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GOD AND MR. WELLS 

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF 
"GOD THE INVISIBLE KING" 




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GOD AND MR. WELLS 

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF 
"GOD THE INVISIBLE KING" 

By WILLIAM ARCHER 




new york * ALFRED A. KNOPF ' 1917 



COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF 

PublisJted, September, 1917 






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*o° 



SEP 24 1917 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



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FOREWORD 

As I look through the proofs of this little 
treatise, a twinge of compunction comes upon me. 
That humane philosopher Mr, Dooley has some- 
where a saying to this effect: "When an astrono- 
mer tells me that he has discovered a new planet, 
I would be the last man to brush the fly off the 
end of his telescope." Would not this have been 
a good occasion for a similar exercise of urbanity? 
Nay, may it not be said that my criticism of God 
the Invisible King is a breach of discipline, like 
duelling in the face of the enemy? I am proud 
to think that Mr. Wells and I are soldiers in the 
same army; ought we not at all costs to maintain 
a united front? On the destructive side (which I 
have barely touched upon) his book is brilliantly 
effective ; on the constructive side, if unconvincing, 
it is thoughtful, imaginative, stimulating, a thing 
on the whole to be grateful for. Ought one not 
rather to hold one's peace than to afford the com- 
mon enemy the encouragement of witnessing a 
squabble in the ranks? 



vi FOREWORD 



But we must not yield to the obsession of mili- 
tary metaphor. It is not what the enemy thinks 
or what Mr. Wells or I think that matters — it is 
what the men of the future ought to think, as being 
consonant with their own nature and with the 
nature of things. Ideas, like organisms, must 
abide the struggle for existence, and if the Invisi- 
ble King is fitted to survive, my criticism will rein- 
force and not invalidate him. Even if he should 
come to life in a way one can scarcely anticipate, 
his proceedings will have to be carefully watched. 
He cannot claim the reticences of a "party truce." 
He will be all the better for a candid, though I 
hope not captious, Opposition. 

I thought of printing on my title-page a motto 
from Mr. Bernard Shaw; but it will perhaps come 
better here. "The fact," says Mr. Shaw, "that a 
believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to 
the point than the fact that a drunken man is 
happier than a sober one. The happiness of 
credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of 
happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. 
Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of 
life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a 
nation of Socrateses would be much safer and 
happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its indi- 



FOREWORD vii 



viduals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. 
At all events, it is in the Socratic man and not in 
the Wesleyan that our hope lies now." 

Besides, it has yet to be proved that the believer 
in the Invisible King is happier than the sceptic. 



London, May 24, 1917. 



CONTENTS 

I The Great Adventurer 1 

II A God Who "Growed" 3 

III New Myths for Old 8 

IV The Apostle's Creed 32 

V When Is a God Not a God? 47 

VI For and Against Personification 73 

VII Back to the Veiled Being 101 



GOD AND MR. WELLS 



THE GREAT ADVENTURER 

WHEN it was known that Mr. H. G. 
Wells had set forth to discover God, 
all amateurs of intellectual adventure 
were filled with pleasurable excitement and antici- 
pation. For is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer 
of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous 
for him, no forlorn-hope too daring. He led the 
first explorers to the moon. He it was who lured 
the Martians to earth and exterminated them with 
microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the 
skies and expiscated a mermaid from the deep. 
He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own 
invention) and gone careering down the vistas of 
the Future. But these were comparatively com- 
monplace feats. After all, there had been a Jules 
Verne, there had been a Gulliver and a Peter 

Wilkins, there had been a More, a Morris and a 

l 



GOD AND MR. WELLS 



Bellamy. It might be that he was fitted for far 
greater things. "There remains," we said to our- 
selves, "the blue ribbon of intellectual adventure, 
the unachieved North Pole of spiritual explora- 
tion. He has had countless predecessors in the 
enterprise, some of whom have loudly claimed 
success; but their log-books have been full of mere 
hallucinations and nursery tales. What if it 
should be reserved for Mr. Wells to bring back the 
first authentic news from a source more baffling 
than that of Nile or Amazon — the source of the 
majestic stream of Being? What if it should be 
given him to sign his name to the first truly- 
projected chart of the scheme of things?" 

We almost held our breath in eager anticipation, 
just as we did when there came from America a 
well-authenticated rumor that the problem of fly- 
ing had at last been solved. Were we on the brink 
of another and much more momentous discovery? 
Was Mr. Wells to be the Peary of the great quest? 
Or only the last of a thousand Dr. Cooks? 



II 



A GOD WHO "GROWED" 



OUR excitement, our suspense, were so 
much wasted emotion. Mr. Wells's en- 
terprise was not at all what we had fig- 
ured it to be. 

GOD 

THE INVISIBLE KING 

is a very interesting, and even stimulating dis- 
quisition, full of a fine social enthusiasm, and 
marked, in many passages, by deep poetic feeling. 
But it is not a work of investigation into the springs 
of Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from 
the outset any dealings with "cosmogony." It is 
a description of a way of thinking, a system of 
nomenclature, which Mr. Wells declares to be ex- 
tremely prevalent in "the modern mind," from 
which he himself extracts much comfort and forti- 
fication, and which he believes to be destined to 
regenerate the world. 



4 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

But Mr. Wells will not have it that what is in- 
volved is a mere system of nomenclature. He 
avers that he, in common with many other like- 
minded persons, has achieved, not so much an in- 
tellectual discovery as an emotional realisation, of 
something actual and objective which he calls God. 
He does not, so far as I remember, use the term 
"objective"; but as he insists that God is "a spirit, 
a person, a strongly marked and knowable person- 
ality" (p. 5), "a single spirit and a single person" 
(p. 18), "a great brother and leader of our little 
beings" (p. 24) with much more to the same pur- 
pose, it would seem that he must have in his mind 
an object external to us, no mere subjective 
"stream of tendency," or anything of that sort. 
It would of course be foolish to doubt the sin- 
cerity of the conviction which he so constantly and 
so eagerly asserts. Nevertheless, one cannot but 
put forward, even at this stage, the tentative theory 
that he is playing tricks with his own mind, and 
attributing reality and personality to something 
that was in its origin a figure of speech. He has 
been hypnotized by the word God: 

As when we dwell upon a word we know, 
Repeating, till the word we know so well 
Becomes a wonder, and we know not why. 



A GOD WHO "GROWED" 



At all events, "God the Invisible King" is not 
the creator and sustainer of the universe. As to 
the origin of things Mr. Wells professes the most 
profound agnosticism. "At the back of all known 
things," he says, "there is an impenetrable cur- 
tain; the ultimate of existence is a Veiled Being, 
which seems to know nothing of life or death or 
good or ill. . . . The new religion does not pre- 
tend that the God of its life is that Being, or that he 
has any relation of control or association with that 
Being. It does not even assert that God knows all, 
or much more than we do, about that ultimate 
Being" (p. 14). Very good; but — here is the first 
question which seems to arise out of the Wellsian 
thesis — are we not entitled to ask of "the new 
religion" some more definite account of the rela- 
tion between "God" and "the Veiled Being"? 
Surely it is not enough that it should simply re- 
frain from "asserting" anything at all on the sub- 
ject. If "God" is outside ourselves ("a Being, not 
us but dealing with us and through us," p. 6) we 
cannot leave him hanging in the void, like the rope 
which the Indian conjurer is fabled to throw up 
into the air till it hooks itself on to nothingness. 
If we are to believe in him as a lever for the right- 
ing of a world that has somehow run askew, we 



GOD AND MR. WELLS 



want to know something of his fulcrum. Is it pos- 
sible thus to dissociate him from the Veiled Being, 
and proclaim him an independent, an agnostic 
God? Do we really get over any difficulty — do we 
not rather create new difficulties, — by saying, as 
Mr. Wells practically does, "Our God is no meta- 
physician. He does not care, and very likely does 
not know, how this tangle of existence came into 
being. He is only concerned to disentangle it a 
little, to reduce the chaos of the world to some sort 
of seemliness and order"? Is it an idle and pre- 
sumptuous curiosity which enquires whether we are 
to consider him co-ordinate with the Veiled Being, 
and in that case probably hostile, or subordinate, 
and in that case instrumental? Are we, in a word, 
to consider the earth a little rebel state in the 
gigantic empire of the universe, working out its 
own salvation under its Invisible King? Or are 
we to regard God as the Viceroy of the Veiled 
Being, to whom, in that case, our ultimate alle- 
giance is due? 

I talked the other day to a young Australian 
who had been breaking new land for wheat- 
growing. "What do you do?" I asked, "with the 
stumps of the trees you fell? It must be a great 
labour to clear them out." "We don't clear them 



A GOD WHO "GROWED" 



out," he replied. "We use ploughs that auto- 
matically rise when they come to a stump, and take 
the earth again on the other side." I cannot but 
conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is 
fitted with some such automatic appliance for soar- 
ing gaily over the snags that stud the ploughlands 
of theology. 



Ill 

NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 

BEFORE examining the particular attributes 
and activities of the Invisible King, let us 
look a little more closely into the question 
whether a God detached alike from man below and 
(so to speak) from heaven above, is a thinkable 
God in whom any satisfaction can be found. Mr. 
Wells must not reply (he probably would not think 
of doing so) that "satisfaction" is no test: that he 
asserts an objective truth which exists, like the 
Nelson Column or the Atlantic Ocean, whether we 
find satisfaction in it or not. Though he does not 
mention the word "pragmatism," his standards are 
purely pragmatist. He offers no jot or tittle of 
evidence for the existence of the Invisible King, 
except that it is a hypothesis which he finds to 
work extremely well. Satisfaction and nothing 
else is the test he applies. So we have every right 
to ask whether the renunciation of all concern 
about the Veiled Being, and concentration upon the 
thought of a finite God, practically unrelated to 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 



the infinite, can bring us any reasonable sense of 
reconciliation to the nature of things. For that, 
I take it, is the essence of religion. 

It was in no spirit of irony that I began this 
essay by expressing the lively interest with which 
I learned that Mr. Wells was setting out on the 
quest for God. The dogmatic agnosticism which 
declares it impossible ever to know anything about 
the whence, how and why of the universe does not 
seem to me more rational than any other dogma 
which jumps from "not yet" to "never." Mr. 
Wells himself disclaims that dogma. He says: "It 
may be that minds will presently appear among 
us of such a quality that the face of that Unknown 
will not be altogether hidden" (p. 108). And in 
another place (p. 15) he suggests that "our God, 
the Captain of Mankind," may one day enable us 
to "pierce the black wrappings," or, in other 
words, to get behind the veil. There is nothing,* 
then, unreasonable or absurd in man's incurable 
inquisitiveness as to God, in the non-Wellsian sense 
of the term. God simply means the key to the 
mystery of existence ; and though the keys hitherto 
offered have all either jammed or turned round 
and round without unlocking anything, it does not 
follow that no real key exists within the reach of 



10 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

human investigation or speculation. Therefore 
one naturally feels a little stirring of hope at the 
news that a fresh and keen intellect, untrammelled 
by the folk-lore theologies of the past, is applying 
itself to the problem. It is always possible, how- 
ever improbable, that we may be helped a little 
forwarder on the path towards realization. One 
comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of 
flying. We had been assured over and over again, 
on the highest authority, that it was an idle dream. 
When we wanted to express the superlative degree 
of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it 
than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of 
man was not to be daunted by a priori demonstra- 
tions of impossibility. One day there came the 
rumour that the thing had been achieved, followed 
soon by ocular demonstration; and now we rub 
shoulders every day with men who have outsoared 
the eagle, and — alas! — carried death and destruc- 
tion into the hitherto stainless empyrean. 

It would seem, then, that there is no reason 
absolutely to despair of some advance towards a 
conception of the nature and reason of the uni- 
verse. And it is certain that Mr. Wells's God 
would stand a better chance of satisfying the innate 
needs of the human intelligence if he had not 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 11 

(apparently) given up as a bad job the attempt 
to relate himself to the causal plexus of the All. 
Is he outside that causal plexus, self -begotten, self- 
existent? Then he is the miracle of miracles, a 
second mystery superimposed on the first. If, on 
the other hand, he falls within the system, he 
might surely manage to convey to his disciples 
some glimmering notion of his place in it. The 
birth-stories of Gods are always grotesque and un- 
edifying, but that is because they belong to folk- 
lore. If this God does not belong to folk-lore, 
surely his relation to the Veiled Being might be 
indicated without impropriety. Mr. Wells, as we 
have seen, hints that his reticence may be due to 
the fact that he does not know. In that case this 
"modern" God is suspiciously like all the ancient 
Gods, whose most unfortunate characteristic was 
that they never knew anything more than their 
worshippers. The reason was not far to seek — 
namely, that they were mere projections of the 
minds of these worshippers, fashioned in their own 
image. But Mr, Wells assures us that this is not 
the case of the Invisible King. 

Mr. Wells will scarcely deny that if it were pos- 
sible to compress his mythology and merge his 
Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result would 



12 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

be a great simplification of the problem. But this 
is not, in fact, possible; for it would mean the 
positing of an all-good and all-powerful Creator, 
which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells rebels 
against, 1 in common with every one who realizes 
the facts of life and the meaning of words. Short 
of this, however, is no other simplification pos- 
sible? Would it not greatly clarify our thought 
if we could bring the Invisible King into action, 
not, indeed, as the creator of all things, but as the 
organizer and director of the surprising and almost 
incredible epiphenomenon which we call life? 
Our scheme would then take this shape: an incon- 
ceivable unity behind the veil, somehow manifest- 
ing itself, where it comes within our ken, in the 
dual form of a great Artificer and a mass of terri- 
bly recalcitrant matter — the only medium in which 
he can work. In other words, the Veiled Being 

i In Mr. Britling Sees It Through, which is in some sense a 
prologue to God the Invisible King, we find an emphatic re- 
nunciation of the all-good and all-powerful God. "The 
theologians," says Mr. Britling, "have been extravagant about 
God. They have had silly, absolute ideas — that he is all 
powerful. That he's omni-everything. . . . Why! if I thought 
there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and 
deaths and all the waste and horror of this war — able to 
prevent these things — doing them to amuse himself — I would 
spit in his empty face" (p. 406). 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 13 

would be as inscrutable as ever, but the Invisible 
King, instead of dropping in with a certain air of 
futility, like a doctor arriving too late at the scene 
of a railway accident, would be placed at the begin- 
ning, not of the universe at large, but of the atomic 
re-arrangements from which consciousness has 
sprung. Can w T e, on this hypothesis (which is 
practically that of Manichaeanism) hazard any 
guess at the motives or forces actuating the Invisi- 
ble King, — or, to avoid confusion, let us say the 
Artificer — which should acquit him of the charge 
of being a callous and mischievous demon rather 
than a well-willing God? Can we not only place 
pain and evil (a tautology) to the account of 
sluggish, refractory matter, but also conjecture a 
sufficient reason why the Artificer should have 
started the painful evolution of consciousness, in- 
stead of leaving the atoms to whirl insentiently in 
the figures imposed on them by the stupendous 
mathematician behind the veil? 

A complete answer to this question would be a 
complete solution of the riddle of existence. That, 
if it be ever attainable, is certainly far enough off. 
But there are some considerations, not always 
sufficiently present to our minds, which may per- 



14 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

haps help us, not to a solution, but to a rational 
restatement, of the riddle. 

It is possible to suppose, in the first place, that 
the Artificer, though entirely well-meaning, was 
not a free agent. We can construct a myth in 
which an Elder Power should announce to a 
Younger Power his intention of setting a number 
of sentient puppets dancing for his amusement, and 
regaling himself with the spectacle of their antics, 
in utter heedlessness of the agonies they must en- 
dure, which would, indeed, lend an additional 
savor to the diversion. This Elder Power, with 
the "sportsman's" preference for pigeons as against 
clay balls, would be something like the God of 
Mr. Thomas Hardy. Then we can imagine the 
Younger Power, after a vain protest demanding, as 
it were, the vice-royalty of the new kingdom, in 
order that he might shape its polity to high and 
noble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some 
approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best 
of a bad business. We should thus have (let us 
say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a proconsulate un- 
der Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually 
substituting order and humanity for oppression 
and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. 
Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 15 

placing the Invisible King, or his equivalent, in a 
conceivable relation to the whole mundane process. 

Now let us proceed to the alternative hypothesis. 
Let us suppose that the Artificer was a free agent, 
and that he voluntarily, and in full view of the 
consequences, engineered the conjunction of atoms 
from which consciousness arose. He could have 
let it alone, he could have suffered life to remain 
an abortive, slumbering potentiality, like the fire 
in a piece of flint; yet he deliberately clashed the 
flint and steel and kindled the torch which was to 
be handed on, not only from generation to genera- 
tion, but from species to species, through all the 
stages of a toilsome, slaughterous, immeasurable 
ascent. If we accept this hypothesis, can we acquit 
the Artificer of wanton cruelty? Can we view his 
action with approval, even with gratitude? Or 
must we, like Mr. Wells, if we wish to find an 
outlet for religious emotion, postulate another, sub- 
sequent, intermeddling Power — like, say, an Amer- 
ican consul at the scene of the Turkish massacre — 
wholly guiltless of the disaster of life, and doing 
his little best to mitigate and remedy it? 

In the present state of our knowledge, it is 
certainly very difficult to see how the kindler of the 
vital lampada, supposing him to have been respon- 



16 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

sible for his actions, can claim from a jury of 
human beings a verdict of absolute acquittal. But 
we can, even now, see certain extenuating circum- 
stances, which evidence not yet available may 
one day so powerfully reinforce as to enable him to 
leave the Court without a stain on his character. 

For one thing, we are too much impressed and 
oppressed by the ideas of magnitude and multi- 
tude. Since we have realized the unspeakable in- 
significance of the earth in relation to the unimag- 
inable vastness of star-sown space, we have come to 
feel such a disproportion between the mechanism 
of life and its upshot, as known in our own experi- 
ence, that we have a vague sense of maleficence, or 
at any rate of brutal carelessness, in the responsible 
Power, whoever that may be. "What is it all," we 
say, "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million 
million of suns?" We feel like insects whom the 
foot of a heedless giant may at any moment crush. 
We dream of the swish of a comet's tail wiping out 
organic life on the planet, and we see, as a matter 
of fact, great natural convulsions, such as the earth- 
quake of Lisbon or the eruption of Mont Pelee, 
treating human communities just as an elephant 
might treat an ant-hill. It is this sense of the im- 
measurable disproportion in things that a pessi- 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 17 

mist poet has expressed in the well-known son- 
net: — 

Know you, my friend, the sudden ecstasy 
Of thought that time and space annihilates, 
Creation in a moment uncreates, 

And whirls the mind, from secular habit free, 

Beyond the spheres, beyond infinity, 

Beyond the empery of the eternal Fates, 
To where the Inconceivable ruminates, 

The unthinkable "To be or not to be?" 

Then, as Existence flickers into sight, 

A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness — 

The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night — 

We know the Affirmative the primal curse, 

And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress, 

This ostentatious, vulgar Universe. 

The mood here recorded is one that must be 
familiar to most thinking people. "The undevout 
astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century deism: 
to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical 
astronomer is dense. There is a sort of colossal 
stupidity about the stars in their courses that over- 
powers and disquiets us. If (as Alfred Russel 
Wallace has argued) the geocentric theory was not 
so far out after all, and the earth, holding a spe- 
cially favored place in the universe, is the only 
home of life, then the disproportion of mechanism 
to result seems absolutely appalling. If, on the 
other hand, all the million million of suns are 



18 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

pouring out vital heat to a like number of inhabited 
planetary systems, the sheer quantity of life, of 
struggle, of suffering implied, seems a thought at 
which to shudder. We are inclined to say to the 
inventor of sentience: "Since this ingenious com- 
bination of yours was at best such a questionable 
boon, surely you might have been content with one 
experiment." 

But all such criticism rests upon a fallacy, or 
rather a brace of interrelated fallacies. There can 
be no disproportion between consciousness and the 
unconscious, because they are absolutely incom- 
mensurable; and number, in relation to conscious- 
ness, is an illusion. Consciousness, wherever it 
exists, is single, indivisible, inextensible; and other 
consciousnesses, and the whole external universe, 
are, to the individual percipient, but shapes in a 
more or less protracted dream. 

Why should we trouble about vastness — mere 
extension in space? There is a sense in which the 
infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more dis- 
quieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the 
flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a 
more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics 
and chemistry of the heavens. In worrying about 
the bigness and the littleness of things, we are 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 19 

making the human body our standard — the body 
whose dimensions are no doubt determined by con- 
venience in relation to terrestrial conditions, but 
have otherwise no sort of sanctity or superiority, 
Tightness or fitness. It happens to be the object to 
which is attached the highest form of consciousness 
we know; but consciousness itself has neither parts 
nor magnitude. And consciousness itself is essen- 
tially greater than the very vastness which appals 
us, seeing that it embraces and envelops it. Enor- 
mous depths of space are pictured in my brain, 
through my optic nerve; and what eludes the magic 
mirror of my retina, my mind can conceive, appre- 
hend, make its own. It is not even true to say that 
the mind cannot conceive infinity — the real truth 
(if I may for once be Chestertonian), the real 
truth is that it can conceive nothing else. "When 
Berkeley said there was no matter" — it mattered 
greatly what he said. Nothing can be more 
certain than that, apart from percipience, there 
is no matter that matters. From the point of 
view of pantheism (the only logical theism) God, 
far from being a Veiled Being, or an Invisible 
King, is precisely the mind which translates it- 
self into the visible, sensible universe, and im- 
presses itself, in the form of a never-ending pag- 



20 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

eant, upon our cognate minds. It has been thought 
that human consciousness may have come into being 
because God wanted an audience. He was tired of 
being a cinematograph-film unreeling before empty 
benches. Some people have even carried the spec- 
ulation further, and wondered whether the attach- 
ment of percipience to organized matter, as in the 
case of human beings, may not be a necessary stage 
in the culture of a pure percipience, capable of fur- 
nishing the pageant of the universe with a perma- 
nent and appreciative audience. In that case the 
Scottish Catechism would be justified, which asks 
"What is the chief end of man?" and answers (as 
Stevenson says) nobly if obscurely: "To glorify 
God and to enjoy Him forever." But enough of 
these idle fantasies. What is certain is that we can 
hold up our heads serenely among the immensities, 
knowing that we are immenser than they. Even if 
they were malevolent — and that they do not seem 
to be — they are no more terrible than the familiar 
dangers of our homely earth. They cannot hurt us 
more than we can be hurt — an obvious truism but 
one which is often overlooked. And this brings us 
to the consideration of the second fallacy which 
sometimes warps our judgment as to the responsi- 
bility of the Power which invented life. 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 21 

We are all apt to speak and think as though 
Sentience were an article capable of accumulation, 
like money or merchandise, in enormous aggregates 
— as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, 
were subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so 
that minor quantities, added together, might mount 
up to an indefinitely gigantic total. Poets and 
philosophers, time out of mind, have been heart- 
broken over the enormous mass of evil in the world, 
and have spoken as though animated nature were 
one great organism, with a brain in which every 
pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable 
members was piled up into a huge, pyramidal 
agony. But this is obviously not so. That very 
"individuation" which to some philosophies is the 
primal curse — the condition by all means to be 
annulled and shaken off 1 — forbids the adding up 
of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the 
source of human misery (which seems a rather 
meaningless proposition) it is beyond all doubt its 
boundary and limit. We are each of us his own 
universe. With each of us the universe is born 
afresh; with each of us it dies — assuming, that is 
to say, that consciousness is extinguished at death. 

lMr. Wells himself is not far from this view. See God the 
Invisible King, pp. 73, 76, and this book, pp. 39-40. 



22 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

There never has been and never can be in the world 
more suffering than a single organism can sustain 
— which is another way of saying that nothing can 
hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an opti- 
mistic statement? Far from it. The individual 
is capable of great extremities of suffering; and 
though not all men, or even most, are put to the 
utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases 
not a few in which a man may well curse the day 
he was born, and see in the universe that was born 
with him nothing but an instrument of torture. 
But such an one must speak for himself. It is 
evident that, take them all round, men accept life 
as no such evil gift. It cannot even be said that, in 
handing it on to others, they are driven by a fatal 
instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, 
and would resist if they could. The vast majority 
have been, and still are, entirely light-hearted about 
the matter, thus giving the best possible proof that 
they cherish no grudge against the source of being, 
but find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If 
it be said that this is due to stupidity, then stupidity 
is one of the factors in the case which the great 
Artificer must be supposed to have foreseen and 
reckoned upon. All these considerations must be 
taken into account when we try to sum up the re- 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 23 

sponsibility of an organizer and director of life, 
acting of his own free will, although he knew that 
the conditions under which he had to work would 
make the achievement of any satisfactory result a 
slow, laborious and painful business. 

"But sympathy!" it may be said — "You have 
left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are 
not only 'individuals' but iron-clad egotists, we suf- 
fer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in 
our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like 
the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact of 
common experience causing us alternate joy and 
pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of 
"individuation." Our nearest and dearest are 
simply factors in our environment, most influential 
factors, but as external to us as the trees or the 
stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away 
their pains and add them to our own, any more 
than they, in their turn, can relieve us of our 
toothache or our sciatica. They are the points, 
doubtless, at which our environment touches us 
most closely, but neither incantation nor Act of 
Parliament, neither priest nor registrar, can make 
even man and wife really "one flesh." It was 
necessary for the conservation of the species that 
a strict limit should be set to the operation of 



24 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

sympathy. Had that emotion been able to pierce 
the shell of individuality, so that one being could 
actually add the sufferings of another, or of many 
others, to his own, life would long ago have come 
to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an imagina 
tive extension of individuality, which is of enor- 
mous social value. But we remain, none the less, 
isolated each in his own universe, and our fellow 
men and women are but shapes in the panorama 
the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled 
Showman unrolls before us. 

In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are 
inclined to give way to certain morbid and senti- 
mental exaggerations of sympathy, which do some 
injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for 
the moment assuming to be responsible for sentient 
life. Many of us are much concerned about "na- 
ture, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of night- 
mare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity 
of swamp and jungle, warren and pond, and of the 
ruthless struggle for existence which has made 
earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In 
this we are again letting the fallacy of number 
take hold of us. There can be no aggregate of 
suffering among lower, any more than among 
higher, organisms; and the amount of pain which 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 25 

individual animals have to endure — even animals 
of those species which we can suppose to possess 
a certain keenness of sensibility — is probably, in 
the vast majority of cases, veiy trifling, ( Half the 
anguish of humanity proceeds from the power of 
looking before and after. The animal, though he 
may suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger, 
cannot know the torture of long-drawn apprehen- 
sion. For most of his life he is probably aware of 
a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter — 
often a very short — spell of vague ill-being; and 
so, the end. Nor is it possible to doubt that the 
experience of some animals includes a great deal 
of positive rapture. If the lark be not really the 
soul of joy, he is the greatest hypocrite under the 
sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant 
vitality which we can scarcely believe to be un- 
accompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mos- 
quito which I squash on the back of my hand, and 
which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a 
short life but doubtless a merry one. The moths 
which, in a tropic night, lie in calcined heaps 
around the lamp, have probably perished in pur- 
suit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on 
the whole, that we need expend much pity on the 
brute creation, or make its destinies a reproach to 



26 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of course, 
that we ought not to detest and try with all our 
might to abolish the cruelties of labor, commerce, 
sport and war. 

Again, as to the great calamities — the earth- 
quakes, shipwrecks, railway accidents, even the 
wars — which are often made a leading count in the 
arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must 
not let ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of num- 
ber. Their spectacular, dramatic aspect naturally 
attracts attention; but the death-roll of a great ship- 
wreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the 
daily bills of mortality of a great city. It is true 
that a violent death, overtaking a healthy man, is 
apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of acute dis- 
tress which he might have escaped had he died of 
gradual decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; 
and a very short space of the agony sometimes at- 
tendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably 
represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But 
there is also another side to the matter. Instanta- 
neous death in a great catastrophe must be reckoned 
as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the 
attendant excitement has often the effect of an 
anodyne. In the upshot, no doubt, such occur- 
rences are rightly called disasters, since their ten- 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 27 

dency is to cause needlessly painful death, under 
circumstances, which in the main, enhance its ter- 
rors; but the sufferings of the victims cannot be 
added together because they occur within a limited 
area, any more than if they had been spread over 
an indefinite tract of space. As for war, it in- 
creases the liability of every individual who comes 
within its wide-flung net to intense bodily and men- 
tal suffering, and to premature and painful death. 
Moreover, it destroys social values which can be 
added up. In this respect it leaves the world face 
to face with an appalling deficit. But we must not 
let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too 
great a reproach to the Artificer of human des- 
tiny. For the soldier, like every other sentient or- 
ganism, is immured in his own universe, and his 
individual debit-and-credit account with the Power 
which placed him there would be no whit different 
if he were indeed the only real existence, and the 
world around him were naught but a dance of 
shadows. 

If there were a country of a hundred million 
people, in which every citizen was born to an 
allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he 
could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock 
enterprises, though he might leave some of it 



28 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

unexpended — we should not, in spite of the 
£500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy 
country. Its effective wealth would be precisely 
a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in 
which every one is born with a limited capacity of 
sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we 
should do wrong to call that world a multi-million- 
aire in misery, even if it could be proved that in 
each individual account the balance of sensation 
was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true 
that if, in one man's account, the balance were 
largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach 
the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred 
or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves 
satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the 
Banker, in opening business, had good reason to 
think that, in the long run, the contents would 
largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely 
blame him for going ahead. And what if, for 
contents and malcontents alike, he had an un- 
covenanted bonus up his sleeve? 

In this disquisition, with its shifting personifica- 
tions, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, 
we may seem to have wandered far away from 
Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 29 

reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us re- 
capitulate. Starting from the idea that its total 
renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as 
to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's sys- 
tem, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these 
matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual 
outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not 
be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, 
omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to 
conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well- 
willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible 
King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as 
a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We 
put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed 
more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than 
Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a 
wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting 
up combinations in matter which it knew would 
work out in cruelty and misery, and another co- 
ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering 
from the first to introduce into the combinations 
of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards 
the good. Then we proposed an alternative 
hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult 
from the moral point of view. We conceived at 
the source of organic life an intelligent and well- 



30 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

willing Power constrained, by some necessity 
"behind the veil/' to carry out his purposes 
through the sluggish, refractory, hampering 
medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to 
act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether 
he could take the affirmative course — choose the 
"Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle would phrase it — 
without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for 
the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of 
the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, per- 
haps, from a touch of special pleading, we ad- 
vanced certain considerations which seemed to 
suggest that his decision to kindle the torch of life 
might, after all, be justified. Our provisional 
conclusion was that though, as at present advised, 
we might not quite see our way to hail him as a 
beneficent Invisible King, yet we need not go to 
the opposite extreme of writing him down a mere 
Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless 
process of groaning and travail, begetting and de- 
vouring, which he had wantonly initiated. That 
is the point at which we have now arrived. 

I hope it need not be said I do not attribute 
any substantive value to the hypothetical myths 
here put forward and discussed — that I do not 
accept either of them, or propose that anyone else 



NEW MYTHS FOR OLD 31 

should accept it, as a probable adumbration of 
what actually occurred "in the beginning" — a 
first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My pur- 
pose was simply, since myth-making was the order 
of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr, Wells's myth, 
by placing beside it one or two other fantasies, 
perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advan- 
tage of not entirely eluding the question of origins. 
I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer 
comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible 
King — that is all I claim for him. 

But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not with- 
out indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is not 
the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge 
in myth-making, he could easily have found some 
metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. 
What he has done is to record a profound spiritual 
experience, common to himself and many other 
good men and true, which has culminated in the 
recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant 
in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty 
to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now 
look more in detail into the gospel according to 
Wells. 



IV 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 



A GOSPEL it is, in all literalness; an 
evangel; a message of glad tidings. It 
is not merely a truth, it is "the Truth" 
(p. 1). Let there be no mistake about it: Mr. 
Wells's ambition is to rank with St. Paul and 
Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. 
He does not in so many words lay claim to in- 
spiration, but it is almost inevitably deducible 
from his premises. He is uttering the first clear 
and definite tidings of a God who is endowed with 
personality, character, will and purpose. To that 
Deity he has submitted himself in enthusiastic 
devotion. If the God does not seize the oppor- 
tunity to speak through such a marvellously suit- 
able, such an ideal, mouthpiece, then practical 
common-sense cannot be one of his attributes. 
Which of the other Gods who have announced 
themselves from time to time has found such a 
megaphone to reverberate his voice? St. Paul was 
a poor tent-maker, whose sermons were not even 

32 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 33 

reported in the religious press, while his letters 
probably counted their public by scores, or at most 
by hundreds. Mr. Wells, from the outset of his 
mission, has the ear of two hemispheres. 

What, then, does he tell us of his God? The 
first characteristic which differentiates him from 
all the other Gods with a big G — for of course we 
pay no heed to the departmental gods of polythe- 
ism — the first fact we must grasp and hold fast to, 
is that he lays no claim to infinity. "This new 
faith . . . worships a finite God" (p. 5; Mr. 
Wells's italics). "He has begun and he never 
will end" (p. 18). "He is within time and not 
outside it" (p. 7). Nothing can be more definite 
than that. There was a time when God did not 
exist; and then somehow, somewhen, he came into 
being. 

Perhaps to ask "When?" would be to trespass 
on the department of origins, from which we are 
explicitly warned off. It would be to trench upon 
"cosmogony." Yet we are not quite without 
guidance. "The renascent religion," we are told, 
"has always been here; it has always been visible 
to those that had eyes to see" (p. 1). "Always," 
in this context, can only mean during the whole 
course of human history. Therefore God must 



34 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

have come into being some time between the issue 
of the creative fiat and the appearance of man on 
the planet. This is a pretty wide margin, but it is 
something to go upon. He may have been con- 
temporary with the amoeba, or with the ichthyo- 
saurus, or haply with the earliest quadrumana. 
At the very latest (if "always" is accurate) he 
must have made his appearance exactly at the 
same time as man; and if I were to give my 
opinion, I should say that was extremely probable. 
At all events, even if he preceded man by a few 
thousand or million years, we are compelled to 
assume that he came in preparation for the advent 
of the human species, determined to be on hand 
when wanted. For we do not gather that the lower 
animals stand in need of his services, or are capable 
of benefiting by them. One might be tempted to 
conceive him as guiding the course of evolution and 
hastening its laggard process; but (as we shall 
see) he scorns the role of Providence, and reso- 
lutely abstains from any intromission in organic 
or meteorological concerns. It would be pleasant 
to think that he had something to do with (for 
instance) the retreat of the ice-cap in the northern 
hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge 
in any such speculation. It would appear that the 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 35 

activity of God is purely psychical and moral — 
that he has no interest in biology, except as it 
influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In 
short, from all that one can make out, this God is 
strictly correlative to Man; and that is a significant 
fact which we shall do well to bear in mind. 

As we have already seen, the Infinite (or Veiled) 
Being is not God (p. 13) ; nor is God the Life 
Force, the "impulse thrusting through matter and 
clothing itself in continually changing material 
forms ... the Will to Be" (pp. 15-16). As we 
have also seen, Mr. Wells refuses to define the 
relation of his God, this "spirit," this "single 
spirit and single person," to either of these in- 
scrutable entities. "God," he says, "comes to us 
neither out of the stars nor out of the pride of life, 
but as a still small voice within" (p. 18). It is by 
"faith" that we "find" him (p. 13) ; but Mr. Wells 
"doubts if faith can be complete and enduring if 
it is not secured by the definite knowledge of the 
true God" (p. 135). What, then, is "faith" in 
this context? It would be too much to say, with 
the legendary schoolboy, that it is "believing what 
you know isn't true." The implication seems 
rather to be that if you begin by believing on in- 
adequate grounds, you will presently attain to 



36 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

belief on adequate grounds, or, in other words, 
knowledge. Thus, when you go to a spiritual 
seance in a sceptical frame of mind, the chill of 
your aura frightens the spirits away, and you 
obtain no manifestations; but if you go in a mood 
of faith, which practically means confident expec- 
tation, the phenomena follow, and you depart a 
convert. I use this illustration in no scoffing 
spirit. The presupposition is not irrational. It 
amounts, in effect, to saying that you must go 
some way to meet God before God can or will 
come to you. This seems a curious coyness; but 
as God is finite and conditioned, a bit of a char- 
acter ("a strongly marked and knowable per- 
sonality," p. 5), there is nothing contradictory 
in it. Even when we read that "the true God 
goes through the world like fifes and drums and 
flags, calling for recruits along the street" (p. 40), 
we must not seize upon the letter of a similitude, 
and talk about inconsistency. You must go out 
to meet even the Salvation Army. It offers you 
salvation in vain if you obstinately bolt your door, 
and insist that an Englishman's house is his castle. 
The finding of this God is very like what revival- 
ists call "conversion" (p. 21). You are oppressed 
by "the futility of the individual life"; you fall 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 37 

into "a state of helpless self-disgust" (p. 21); 
you are, in short, in the condition described by 
Hamlet when he says: "It goes so heavily with my 
disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems 
to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent 
canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging 
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden 
fire, why it appears no other thing to me but a 
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." The 
condition may result, as in Hamlet's case, from an 
untoward conjunction of outward circumstances; 
or it may be of physiological (liverish) origin. 
The methods of treatment are many — some of them 
(such as the administration of alcohol in large 
doses) disastrously unwise. In some states of 
society and periods of history, religion is the popu- 
lar specific; and there have been, and are, forms 
of religion to which alcohol would be preferable. 
Fortunately, one can say without a shadow of 
hesitancy that "the modern religion" lies under 
no such suspicion. As dispensed by Mr. Wells, it 
is entirely wholesome. If it is found to cheer, it 
will certainly not inebriate. Indeed, the doubt 
one feels as to its popular success lies in the very 
fact that it contains but an innocuous proportion of 
alcohol. 



38 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

You find yourself, then, in the distressful case 
described by Hamlet and Mr. Wells. "Man de- 
lights you not, no, nor woman neither." You 
cannot muster up energy even to kill King 
Claudius. You go about gloomily soliloquizing on 
suicide and kindred topics. Then, "in some way 
the idea of God comes into the distressed mind" 
(p. 21). It develops through various stages, out- 
lined by Mr. Wells in the passage cited. In the 
modern man, it would seem, one great difficulty 
lies in "a curious resistance to the suggestion that 
God is truly a person" (p. 22). It is here, no 
doubt, that faith comes in; at all events, you 
ultimately get over this stumbling-block. "Then 
suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God 
comes. The cardinal experience is an undoubting 
immediate sense of God. It is the attainment of 
an absolute certainty that one is not alone in one- 
self" (p. 23). You have come, in fact, to the gate 
of Damascus. You have found salvation. 

Yes, salvation! — there is no other word for it. 
Mr. Wells does not hesitate to use both that word 
and its correlative, damnation. From what, then, 
are you saved? Why, from quite a number of 
things. You are saved "from the purposelessness 
of life" (p. 18). God's immortality has "taken 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 39 

the sting from death" (p. 22). You have escaped 
"from the painful accidents and chagrins of in- 
dividuation" (p. 73). "Salvation is to lose one- 
self" (p. 73); it is "a complete turning away 
from self" (p. 84). "Damnation is really over- 
individuation, and salvation is escape from self 
into the larger being of life" (p. 76). In another 
place we are told that salvation is "escape from 
the individual distress at disharmony and the in- 
dividual defeat by death, into the Kingdom of 
God, and damnation can be nothing more and 
nothing less than the failure or inability or dis- 
inclination to make that escape" (p. 148) . On the 
next page we have another definition of damna- 
tion (borrowed, it would seem, from Mr. Clutton 
Brock), with which I hasten to express my cordial 
and enthusiastic agreement: "Satisfaction with 
existing things is damnation." I have always 
thought that hell was the headquarters of con- 
servatism, and am delighted to find such influential 
backing for that pious opinion. 

As for sin, it seems to be a falling away from 
the state of grace attained through conversion. 
You can and do sin while you are still unconverted ; 
for we are told that "repentance is the beginning 
and essential of the religious life" (p. 165). 



40 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

Probably (though this is not clear) your unregener- 
ate condition is in itself sinful, "individuation" be- 
ing not very different from the Original Sin of the 
theologians. But it is sin after regeneration that 
really matters. "Salvation leaves us still dishar- 
monious, and adds not one inch to our spiritual and 
moral nature" (p. 146). "It is the amazing and 
distressful discovery of every believer so soon as 
the first exaltation of belief is past, that one does 
not remain always in touch with God" (p. 149). 
One blackslides. One reverts to one's unregener- 
ate type. The old Adam makes disquieting resur- 
gences in the swept and garnished mansion from 
which he seemed to have been for ever cast out. 
"This is the personal problem of Sin. Here prayer 
avails; here God can help us" (p. 150). And 
what is still more consoling, "though you sin sev- 
enty times seven times, God will still forgive the 
poor rest of you. . . . There is no sin, no state 
that, being regretted and repented of, can stand be- 
tween God and man" (p. 156). 

We shall have to consider later what useful pur- 
pose (if any) is served by this free-and-easy use 
of the dialect of revivalism. In the meantime, one 
would be sorry to seem to write without respect of 
the depth of conviction which Mr. Wells throws into 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 41 

his account of the supreme spiritual experience of 
finding God. "Thereafter," he says, "one goes 
about the world like one who was lonely and has 
found a lover, like one who was perplexed and has 
found a solution" (pp. 23-24). God is a "huge 
friendliness, a great brother and leader of our lit- 
tle beings" (p. 24). "He is a stimulant; he makes 
us live immortally and more abundantly. I have 
compared him to the sensation of a dear strong 
friend who comes and stands quietly beside one, 
shoulder to shoulder" (p. 39). It certainly takes 
some courage for a modern Englishman, not by 
profession a licensed dealer in spiritual sentimen- 
tality, to write like this. 

And now comes the question, What does God do? 
What does he aim at? And how does he effect his 
purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a lit- 
eral, tangible sense, he does nothing. He operates 
solely in and through the mind of man; and even 
through the mind of man he does not influence ex- 
ternal events. This, it may be said, is impossible, 
since all those external events which we call human 
conduct flow from the mind of man. Perhaps it 
would be correct to say (for here Mr. Wells gives 
us no explicit guidance) that external events are 
only a by-product of the influence of God: that, 



42 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

having begotten a certain spiritual state which he 
feels to be generally desirable, he takes no re- 
sponsibility for the particular consequences that 
are likely to flow from it. So, at least, one can best 
interpret Mr. Wells's repeated disclaimer of the 
idea that "God is Magic or God is Providence" 
(p. 27), that "all the time, incalculably, he is 
pulling about the order of events for our personal 
advantages" (p. 35-6). Commenting on Mr. Ed- 
wyn Bevan's phrase for God, "the Friend behind 
phenomena," Mr. Wells insists that the expression 
"carries with it no obligation whatever to believe 
that this Friend is in control of the phenomena" 
(p. 87). Perhaps not; but it is a question for 
after consideration whether lucidity is promoted by 
giving the name God to a Power which has no power 
— which does not seem even to make directly pur- 
posive use of the influence which it possesses over 
the minds of believers. Once, in a coasting 
steamer on the Pacific, I nearly died of sea-sick- 
ness. A friend was with me, the soul of kindness, 
such a lovable old man that I write this down partly 
for the pleasure of recalling him. He used to 
come to my cabin every hour or so, shake his head 
mournfully, and go away again. I felt his good 
will and was grateful for it; but it would be affecta- 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 43 

tion to pretend that I would not have been still more 
grateful had he possessed some "control of phe- 
nomena" — had he brought with him a remedy. 
Since those days, more than one efficacious prevent- 
ive of sea-sickness has been discovered; and I own 
to counting the nameless chemists who have 
achieved this marvel among the most authentic 
friends to poor humanity of whom we have any 
knowledge. Where is the God (as Mr. Zangwill 
has pertinently enquired) who will give us a cure 
for cancer? 

This, however, is a digression, or at any rate 
an anticipation. What the Invisible King actually 
does, without meddling with phenomena, is to as- 
sume the "captaincy" of the "racial adventure" in 
which we are engaged (p. 76). "God must love 
his followers as a great captain loves his men • . . 
whose faith alone makes him possible. It is an 
austere love. The Spirit of God will not hesitate 
to send us to torment and bodily death" (p. 67). 
And what is this "racial adventure"? It is, in the 
first place, the achievement of Mr. Wells's political 
ideals — an object which has all my sympathy, since 
they happen to be, generally speaking, my own. 
"As a knight in God's service," says Mr. Wells, "I 
take sides against injustice, disorder, and against 



44 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

all those temporal kings, emperors, princes, land- 
lords, and owners, who set themselves up against 
God's rule and worship" (p. 97). By all means! 
Only one does not see how, if the kings, emperors 
and landlords declare that they, too, have found 
God, and found him on the side of monarchy and 
landlordism, this contention of theirs is to be con- 
futed. If God does not control phenomena, the 
actual controllers of events will be able to main- 
tain in the future, as in the past, that he is on the 
side of the big battalions — an argument which it 
will be hard to meet, except by raising bigger bat- 
talions. In the meantime we have to note that 
God's political opinions are only provisional, and 
that he himself is open to conviction. "The first 
purpose of God is the attainment of clear knowl- 
edge, of knowledge as a means to more knowledge, 
and of knowledge as a means to power" (p. 98-9). 
And the object to which he will apply this power 
is "the conquest of death: first the overcoming of 
death in the individual by the incorporation of the 
motives of his life into an undying purpose, and 
then the defeat of that death which seems to threaten 
our species upon a cooling planet beneath a cool- 
ing sun" (p. 99). Ultimately, then, it would seem 
that God does intend to undertake the control of 



THE APOSTLE'S CREED 45 

phenomena. Dealing with ice-caps is not so en- 
tirely outside his province as one had hastily as- 
sumed. The Invisible King is not, after all, a 
roi faineant. He will begin to do things as soon 
as he knows how: any other course would be ob- 
viously rash. One would like to live a few hun- 
dred thousand years, to see him come into overt 
action. Yet, in this far-reaching program, there 
seems to lurk a certain contradiction, or at least 
an ambiguity. If, for the believer in God, death 
has, here and now, lost its sting — if "we come 
staggering through into the golden light of his king- 
dom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until, at 
last, we are altogether taken up into his being" 
(p. 68) — one does not quite see the reason for this 
long campaign against death. Surely the logical 
consummation would be an ultimate racial eutha- 
nasia, an absorption of humanity into God, a vast 
apotheosis-nirvana, after which the earth and sun 
could go on cooling at their leisure. 

Apart from one or two irrepressible "asides," 
I have attempted in this chapter to let Mr. Wells 
speak for himself, proclaim the faith that is in 
him, and draw the portrait of his God. Many 
details are of course omitted, for which the reader 



46 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

must turn to the original text. He will find it a 
pleasant and profitable task. The remainder of 
my present undertaking falls into three parts. 
First I must ask the reader to consider with me 
whether Mr. Wells's gospel can be accepted as a 
real addition to knowledge, like (say) the discovery 
of radium, or whether it is only a re-description 
in new language (or old language slightly refur- 
bished) of familiar facts of spiritual experience. 
In the second place, assuming that we have to fall 
back on the latter alternative, we shall enquire 
whether anything would be gained by the general 
acceptance of this new-old, highly emotionalized 
terminology. Thirdly, I shall venture to suggest 
that when Mr. Wells says "The first purpose of 
God is the attainment of clear knowledge, of knowl- 
edge as a means to more knowledge, and of knowl- 
edge as a means to power," he is only choosing a 
mythological way of expressing the fact that if God 
(in the ordinary, non-Wellsian sense of the word) 
is ever to be found, it must be through patient in- 
vestigation of the phenomena in which he clothes 
himself. 



V 

WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 

THOUGH many of Mr. Wells's asseverations 
of the substantive reality of his Invisible 
King have been quoted above, it would be 
easy to lengthen their array. There is nothing on 
which he is so insistent. For example, "God is no 
abstraction nor trick of words. . . . 1 He is as 
real as a bayonet thrust or an embrace" (p. 56). 
And again, on the same page: "He feels us and 
knows us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He 
hopes and attempts." There is no limit to the an- 
thropomorphism of the language which Mr. Wells 
currently employs. Or rather, there is only one 
limit: he disclaims the notion that his God is actu- 
ally existent in space, that he has parts and dimen- 
sions, and inhabits a form in any way analogous to 
ours. He is the Invisible King, not merely, like the 

i The words here omitted, "no Infinite," are nothing to the 
present purpose. Mr. Wells has started by making this declar- 
ation, which we accept without difficulty. No one will suspect 
the Invisible King of being an "Infinite" in disguise. 

47 



48 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

Spanish Fleet, because he " is not yet in sight," 
but because he has no material or "astral" integu- 
ment. Being outside space (though inside time) 
he can be omnipresent (p. 61). But of course Mr. 
Wells would not pretend that no deity can be called 
anthropomorphic who is not actually conceived as 
incarnate in the visible figure of a man. An an- 
thropomorphic God is one who reflects the mental 
characteristics of his worshippers; and that Mr, 
Wells's God does, if ever God did in this world. 

Yet almost in the same breath in which he is 
claiming for his God the fullest independent reality 
— thinking of him "as having moods and aspects, 
as a man has, and a consistency we call his char- 
acter" (p. 63) — he will use language implying that 
he is that very abstraction of the better parts of 
human nature which has been proposed for worship 
in all the various "religions of humanity," 
"ethical churches," and so forth, for two or three 
generations past. Listen to this: "Though he 
does not exist in matter or space, he exists in time, 
just as a current of thought may do; he changes 
and becomes more even as a man's thought gathers 
itself together; somewhere in the dawning of man- 
kind he had a beginning, an awakening, and as 
mankind grows he grows. . . . He is the undying 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 49 

human memory, the increasing human will" 
(p. 61) . When, in the last chapter, I discussed the 
date of the divinity's birth, I had overlooked this 
text. Here we have it in black and white that 
he did not precede mankind — that, of course, 
would have implied independence — but began 
with the "dawning" of the race, and has grown 
with its growth. Moreover, the analogy of a "cur- 
rent of thought" is expressly suggested — reinforc- 
ing the suspicion which has all along haunted us 
that the God of Mr. Wells is nothing else than what 
is known to less mythopoeic thinkers as a "stream of 
tendency." But Mr. Wells will by no means have 
it so. Indeed he evidently regards this as the most 
annoying, and perhaps damnable, of heresies. 
On the very next page he proceeds to rule out the 
suggestion that "God is the collective mind and 
purpose of the human race." "You may declare," 
he says, "that this is no God, but merely the sum of 
mankind. But those who believe in the new ideas 
very steadfastly deny that. God is, they say, not 
an aggregate but a synthesis." And he goes on to 
suggest various analogies: a temple is more than a 
gathering of stones, a regiment more than an ac- 
cumulation of men: we do not love the soil of our 
back garden, or the chalk of Kent, or the limestone 



50 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

of Yorkshire; yet we love England, which is made 
up of these things. So God is more than the sum 
or essence of the nobler impulses of the race: he is 
a spirit, a person, a friend, a great brother, a cap- 
tain, a king: he "is love and goodness" (p 80); 
and without him the Service of Man is "no better 
than a hobby, a sentimentality or a hypocrisy" (p. 
95). 

Let us reflect a little upon these analogies, and 
see whether they rest on any solid basis. Why is 
a temple more than a heap of stones? Because 
human intelligence and skill have entered into the 
stones and organized them to serve a given pur- 
pose or set of purposes: to delight the eye, to ele- 
vate the mind, to express certain ideas, to afford 
shelter for worshippers against wind, rain and sun. 
Why is a regiment more than a mob? Again be- 
cause it has been deliberately and elaborately or- 
ganized to fulfil certain functions. Why is Eng- 
land more than the mere rocks of which it is com- 
posed? Because these materials have been 
grouped, partly by nature, but very largely by the 
labor of untold generations of our fathers, into 
forms which give pleasure to the eye and appeal to 
our most intimate and cherished associations. Be- 
sides, when we speak of "England," we do not think 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 51 

only or mainly of its physical aspects. We think 
of it as a great community, with an ancient, and in 
some ways admirable, tradition of political life, 
with a splendid record of achievement in both ma- 
terial and spiritual things, with a great past, and 
(we hope) a greater future. In all these cases the 
parts have been fused into a whole by human effort, 
either consciously or instinctively applied; and it 
is in virtue of this effort alone that the whole tran- 
scends its parts. But in the case of a God "syn- 
thetized" out of the thought and feeling of untold 
generations of men, the analogy breaks down at 
every point. To assume that portions of psychic 
experience are capable of vital coalescence, is to 
beg the whole question. We know that stone can 
be piled on stone, that men can be trained to form a 
platoon, a cohort, a phalanx; but that detached 
fragments of mind are capable of any sort of co- 
hesion and organization we do not know at all. 
And, even if this point could be granted, where is 
the organizing power? We should have to postu- 
late another God to serve as the architect or the 
drill-sergeant of our synthetic divinity. Nor would 
it help matters to suggest that the God (as it were) 
crystallized himself; for that is to assume structural 
potentialities in his component parts which must 



52 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

have come from somewhere, so that again we have 
to presuppose another God. It is true, no doubt, 
that portions of thought and feeling can be col- 
lected, arranged, edited, in some sense organized, 
by human effort; but the result is an encyclopaedia, 
a thesaurus, an anthology, a liturgy, a bible — -not a 
God. It may, like the Vedas, the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures and the Koran, become an object of idolatry; 
but even its idolaters see in it only an emanation 
from God, not the God himself. All this argu- 
ment may strike the reader as extremely nebulous, 
but I submit that the fault is not mine. It was not 
I who sought to demonstrate the reality of a figure 
of speech by placing it on all fours with a cathedral 
and a regiment. The whole contention is so baf- 
fling that reason staggers and flounders as in a 
quicksand. It rests upon a mixture of categories, 
as palpable and yet as elusive as anything in The 
Hunting of the Snark. 

If you tell me that Public Opinion is a God, I 
am quite willing to consider whether the metaphor 
is a luminous and helpful one. But if you protest 
that it is no metaphor at all, but a literal state- 
ment of fact, like the statement that Mr. Woodrow 
Wilson is President of the United States, I no 
longer know where we are. Mr. Wells's "undying 




WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 53 

human memory and increasing human will" can- 
not exactly be identified with Public Opinion, but 
it belongs to the same order of ideas. Here there 
is an actual workable analogy. But there is no 
practicable analogy between a purely mental con- 
cept and a physical construction. You will not 
help me to believe in (say) the doctrine of Original 
Sin, by assuring me that it is built, like the Tower 
Bridge, on the cantilever principle. 

It is quite certain that, if passionate conviction 
and the free use of anthropomorphic language can 
make a figure of speech a God, the Invisible King 
is an individual entity, as detached from Mr. Wells 
as Michelangelo's Moses from Michelangelo. 
Paradoxically enough, he has put on "individua- 
tion" that his worshippers may escape from it. 
Mr. Wells's book teems with expressions — -I have 
given many examples of them — which are wholly 
inapplicable to any metaphor, however galvanized 
into a semblance of life by ecstatic contemplation 
in the devotional mind. For example, when we 
are told that it is doubtful whether "God knows 
all, or much more than we do, about the ultimate 
Being," the mere assertion of a doubt implies the 
possibility of knowledge of a quite different order 
from any that exists in the human intelligence. 



54 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

Mr. Wells explicitly assures us that knowledge of 
the Veiled Being is (for the present at any rate) 
inaccessible to our faculties; but he implies that 
such knowledge may be possessed by the Invisible 
King; and as knowledge cannot possibly be a syn- 
thesis of ignorances, it follows that the Invisible 
King has powers of apprehension quite different 
from, and independent of, any operation of the 
human brain. These powers may not, as a matter 
of fact, have solved the enigma of existence; but 
it is clearly implied that they might conceivably 
do so; and indeed the text positively asserts that 
God knows something more of the Veiled Being 
than we do, though perhaps not "much." In view 
of this passage, and many others of a like nature, 
we cannot fall back on the theory that Mr. Wells 
is merely trying, by dint of highly imaginative 
writing, to infuse life into a deliberate personifica- 
tion, like Robespierre's Goddess of Reason or 
Matthew Arnold's Zeitgeist. However difficult it 
may be, we must accustom ourselves to the belief 
that his assertions of the personal existence of his 
God represent the efficient element in his thought, 
and that if other passages seem inconsistent with 
that idea — seem to point to mere abstraction or 
allegorization of the mind of the race — it is these 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 55 

passages, and not the more full-blooded pronounce- 
ments, that must be cancelled as misleading or 
inadequate. There can be no doubt that the God 
to whom Mr. Wells seeks to convert us is (in his 
apostle's conception) much more of a President 
Wilson than of a Zeitgeist. 

It would be possible, of course, for a God, how- 
ever dubious and even inconceivable the method of 
his "synthesis," to manifest himself in his effects 
— to prove his existence by his actions. But this, 
as we have seen, the Invisible King scorns to do. 
His adherents, we are told, "advance no proof what- 
ever of the existence of God but their realization of 
him" (p. 98). There is a sort of implication that 
the Deity will not descend to vulgar miracle-work- 
ing. "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh 
after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it" 
— not even "the sign of Jonah the prophet." 

But to ask for some sort of visible or plausibly 
conjecturable effect is not at all the same thing as 
to ask for miracles. Mr. Wells proclaims with all 
his might that the Invisible King works the most 
marvellous and beneficent changes in the minds of 
his devotees; why, then, do these changes produce 
no recognizable effect on the course of events? The 



56 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

God who can work upon the human mind has the 
key to the situation in his hands — why, then, does 
he make such scant use of it? Is God only a 
luxury for the intellectually wealthy? The cham- 
pagne of the spiritual life? A stimulant and ano- 
dyne highly appreciated in the best circles, but 
inaccessible to the man of small spiritual means, 
whether he be a dweller in palaces or in the slums? 

To say that a given Power can and does potently 
affect the human mind, and yet cannot, or at least 
does not, produce any appreciable or demonstrable 
effect on the external aspects of human life, is like 
asking us to believe that a man is a heaven-born 
conductor who can get nothing out of his orchestra 
but discords and cacophonies. 

Mr. Wells may perhaps reply that his God does 
recognizably influence the course of events — in- 
deed, that everything in history which we see to be 
good and desirable is the work of the Invisible King 
— but that he does not advance this fact as a proof 
of God's existence, because it is discernible only to 
the eye of faith and cannot be brought home to 
unregenerate reason. I do not imagine that he will 
take this line, for it would come dangerously near 
to identifying God with Providence — a heresy 
which he abhors. But supposing some other adept 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 57 

in "modern religion" were to make this claim on 
behalf of the Invisible King, would it go any way 
towards persuading us that we owe him our alle- 
giance? 

The assumption would be, as I understand it, 
that of a finite God, unable to modify the opera- 
tions of matter, but with an unlimited, or at any 
rate a very great, power of influencing the work- 
ings of the human mind. He would have no con- 
trol over meteorological conditions: he could not 
"ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm"; he 
could not subdue the earthquake or prevent the 
Greenland glacier from "calving" icebergs into 
the Atlantic. He could not release the human body 
from the rhythms of growth and decay; he could 
not eradicate that root of all evil, the association 
of consciousness with a mechanism requiring to be 
constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel 
which exists only in limited quantities. If God 
could arrange for life to be maintained on a diet 
of inorganic substances — if he could enable ani- 
mals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases 
for their sustenance, instead of having it, so to 
speak, half-digested in the vegetable kingdom — or 
even if, under the present system, he could make 
fecundity, in any given species, automatically pro- 



58 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

portionate to the supply of food — he would at one 
stroke refashion earthly life in an extremely desir- 
able sense. But this we assume to be beyond his 
competence: the Veiled Being has autocratically 
imposed the struggle for existence as an inexorable 
condition of the Invisible King's activities, except 
in so far as it can be eluded by and through the 
human intelligence. His problem, then, will be to 
guide the minds of men towards a realization that 
their higher destiny lies in using their intelligence 
to substitute ordered co-operation for the san- 
guinary competition above which merely instinc- 
tive organism are incapable of rising. 

Observe that in exercising this power of psychical 
influence there would be no sort of miracle-work- 
ing, no interference with the order of nature. The 
influence of mind upon mind, even without the in- 
tervention of words or other symbols, is a part of 
the order of nature which no one to-day dreams 
of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a depart- 
ment of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy 
is more and more widely admitted, if only as a 
refuge from the hypothesis of survival after death. 
If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to 
the problems of humanity, and capable of suggest- 
ing ideas to the mind of man — appealing, as a "still 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 59 

small voice" (p. 18), to his intelligence, his emo- 
tions and his will — one cannot but figure its power 
for good as almost illimitable. What is to pre- 
vent it from achieving a very rapid elimination of 
the ape and the tiger, the Junker and the Tory, 
and substituting social enthusiasms for individual 
passions as the motive-power of human conduct? 
We may admit that the brain of man must first 
be developed up to a certain point before divine 
suggestion could effectively work upon it. But we 
know that men and races of magnificent brain- 
power must have existed on the planet thousands 
and thousands of years ago. What, then, has the 
Invisible King made of his opportunities? 

Frankly, he has made a terrible hash of them. 
It is hard to see how the progress of the race could 
possibly have been slower, more laborious, more 
painful than in fact it has been. No doubt there 
have been a few splendid spurts, which we may, 
if we please, trace to the genial goading of the 
Invisible King. But all the great movements have 
dribbled away into frustration and impotence. 
There was, for example, the glorious intellectual 
efflorescence of Greece. There, you may say, the 
Invisible King was almost visibly at work. But, 
after all, what a flash-in-the-pan it was! Hellas 



60 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

was a little island of light surrounded by gloomy 
immensities of barbarism; yet, instead of stab- 
lishing and fortifying a political cosmos, its lead- 
ing men had nothing better to do than to plunge 
into the bloody chaos of the Peloponnesian War, 
and set back the clock of civilization by untold cen- 
turies. What was the Invisible King about when 
that catastrophe happened? Similarly, the past 
two centuries, and especially the past seventy-five 
years, have witnessed a marvellous onrush in man's 
intellectual apprehension of the universe and mast- 
ery over the latent energies of matter. But be- 
cause moral and political development has lagged 
hopelessly behind material progress, the world is 
plunged into a war of unexampled magnitude and 
almost unexampled fury, wherein the heights of 
the air and depths of the sea are pressed into the 
service of slaughter. Where was the Invisible 
King in July, 1914? Or, for that matter, what has 
he been doing since July, 1870? "Either he was 
musing, or he was on a journey, or peradventure he 
slept." Truly it would seem that he might have 
advised Mr. Wells to wait for the "Cease fire!" be- 
fore proclaiming his godhead. 

Of course Mr. Wells will remind me that he 
claims for him no material potency; and I must 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 61 

own that no happier moment could have been 
chosen for the annunciation of an impotent God. 
But the plea does not quite tally with the facts. In 
the first place (as we have seen) the Invisible King 
is going to do things — he is going to do very re- 
markable things as soon as he knows how. And in 
the second place it is impossible to conceive that 
the tremendous psychical influence which is claimed 
for this God can be exercised without producing 
external reactions. Why, he is actually stated to 
be — like another God, his near relative, whom he 
rather unkindly disowns — he is stated to be "the 
light of the world" (p. 18). Is there any mean- 
ing in such a statement if it be not pertinent to ask 
what sort of light has led the world into the 
ghastly quagmire in which it is to-day agonizing? 
The truth is that Mr. Wells attributes to his God 
powers which, even if he had no greater knowl- 
edge than Mr. Wells himself possesses, could be 
used to epoch-making advantage. Fancy an omni- 
present H. G. Wells, able to speak in a still small 
voice to all men of good-will throughout the world ! 
What a marvellous revolution might he not effect! 
Mr. Wells himself has outlined such a revolution 
in one of his most thoughtful romances, In the 
Days of the Comet. From the fact that it does 



62 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

not occur, may we not fairly suspect that the In- 
visible King is a creation of the same mythopceic 
faculty which engendered the wonder-working 
comet with its aura of sweet-reasonableness? 

If we turn to Mr. Britling, we find that that 
eminent publicist was distressed by a sense of the 
difficulty of conveying God's message to the world ; 
only he modestly attributed it to defects in his own 
equipment rather than to powerlessness on the part 
of God. We read on page 427: — "Never 
had it been so plain to Mr. Britling that he was 
a weak, silly, ill-informed and hasty-minded 
writer, and never had he felt so invincible a con- 
viction that the Spirit of God was in him, and that 
it fell to him to take some part in the establishment 
of a new order of living upon the earth. . . . Al- 
ways he seemed to be on the verge of some illumi- 
nating and beautiful statement of his cause; always 
he was finding his writing inadequate, a thin treach- 
ery to the impulse of his heart." Have we not in 
such an experience an irrefutable proof of the in- 
efficacy of Mr. B riding's God? Always the world 
has been all ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive 
message from God; always, or at any rate for many 
thousands of years, there have been men who 
seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 63 

message; always what purported to be the word 
of God has proved to be either powerless to make 
itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of 
hideous moral and social corruptions. God spoke 
(it is said) through the Vedic rishis, the sages of 
the Himalayas — and the result has been caste, cow- 
worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism, and 
nameless orgies of sensuality. God spoke through 
Moses, and the result was — Judaism! God spoke 
through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and 
Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the 
Thirty Years' War, massacres beyond computation, 
and the slowly calcined flesh of an innumerable 
army of martyrs. All this, no doubt, was due to 
gross and palpable misunderstanding of the mes- 
sage delivered through Jesus; but since it was so 
fatally open to misunderstanding, would it not bet- 
ter have remained undelivered? Could the world 
have been appreciably worse off without it? The 
question is rather an idle one, since it turns on 
"might have beens." That the element of good in 
the message of Jesus has been to some extent ef- 
ficient, no one would deny. But the alloy of po- 
tential evil has made itself so overpoweringly actual 
that to strike a balance between the two forces is 
impossible, and the question is generally decided 



64 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

by throwing a solid chunk of prejudice into one 
scale or the other. 

There has never been a time when a really well- 
informed revelation, uttered with charm and 
power, might not have revolutionized the world. 
"A well-informed revelation!" the reader may cry: 
"What terrible bathos!" Mr. Wells, moreover, 
speaks slightingly of revelation (pp. 19, 163) in a 
tone that seems to imply that "modern religion" 
would have nothing to do with it even if it could. 
But the demand for a revelation is eminently 
reasonable and justified; and the only trouble about 
the historic revelations is that they have all been so 
shockingly ill-informed, and have revealed noth- 
ing to the purpose. Robert Louis Stevenson antici- 
pated Mr. Wells's view of the matter when he 
wrote ironically: — 

It's a simple thing that I demand, 

Though humble as can be — 
A statement fair in my Maker's hand 

To a gentleman like me — 

A clean account, writ fair and broad, 

And a plain apologee — 
Or deevil a ceevil word to God 

From a gentleman like me. 

But why this irony? What an infinity of trouble 
and pain would have been saved if such a "clean 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 65 

account, writ fair and broad," had been vouch- 
safed, and had been found to tally with the facts! 
Nor have the reputedly wise and good of this world 
seen any presumption in desiring such a com- 
munique. Most of them thought they had received 
it, and many wasted half their lives in attempting 
to reconcile new knowledge with old ignorance, 
promulgated under the guarantee of God. I can- 
not but think that the poet got nearer the heart of 
the matter who wrote: — 

Was Moses upon Sinai taught 
How Sinai's mighty ribs were wrought? 
Did Buddha, 'neath the bo-tree's shade, 
Learn how the stars were poised and swayed? 

Did Jesus still pain's raging storm, 
And dower the world with chloroform? 
Or Mahomet a jehad decree 
'Gainst microbe-harboring gnat and flea? 

Has revelation e'er revealed 

Aught from its age and hour concealed? 

Or miracle, since time began, 

Conferred a single boon on Man? 

Truly, we may agree with Mr. Wells that the 
Invisible King was probably not in the secrets of 
the Veiled Being, else he could scarcely have kept 
them so successfully. But have we any use for a 
God who can teach us nothing? who has to be 



66 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

taught by us before he can do anything worth 
mentioning? The old Gods who professed to teach 
were much more rational in theory, if only their 
teaching had not been all wrong. Man has built 
up his knowledge of the universe he lives in by 
slow, laborious degrees, not helped, but constantly 
and cruelly hindered, by his Gods. Yet Mr. 
Wells will surely not deny that an approximately 
true conception of the process of nature, and of 
his own origin and history, was an indispensable 
basis for all right and lasting social construction. 
What colossal harm has been wrought, for in- 
stance, by the fairy-tale of the Fall, and all its 
theological consequences! Yet, age after age, the 
Invisible King did nothing to shake its calamitous 
prestige. Of late it is true that the progress of 
knowledge has seemed no longer slow, but 
amazingly rapid; but that is because the amount 
of energy devoted to it has been multiplied a hun- 
dredfold. Each new step is still a very short one: 
it is generally found that several investigators have 
independently arrived at the verge of a new dis- 
covery, and it is often a matter of chance which 
of them first crosses the line and is lucky enough 
to associate his name with the completed achieve- 
ment. All this means that to-day, as from the be- 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 67 

ginning, man has to wring her secrets from Nature 
in the sweat of his brain, and without the smallest 
assistance from any Invisible King or other poten- 
tate. To-day there are doubtless beneficent secrets 
under our very noses, so to speak, which one word 
of a still small voice might enable us to grasp, but 
which may remain undiscovered, to our great detri- 
ment, for centuries to come. There is, in short, no 
single point, either in history or in contemporary 
life, where "the light of the world" can be shown, 
or plausibly conjectured, to have lighted us to any 
practical purpose. And it is futile to urge, I re- 
peat, that it could not have done so without a mirac- 
ulous disturbance of the order of nature. The in- 
fluence of mind upon mind, however conveyed, is 
the most natural thing in the world; and, short of 
transplanting mountains, inhibiting earthquakes, 
and teaching people to subsist on air, there is noth- 
ing that mind cannot do. 

Besides, when we come to think of it, why this 
prejudice against miracles? Why is Mr. Wells so 
sternly opposed to the bare idea of Providence? 
"Fear and feebleness," he says, "go straight to the 
Heresies that God is Magic or that God is Provi- 
dence" (p. 27) — as though it were disgracefully 
pusillanimous to prefer a well-governed to an un- 



68 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

governed world. God, in the ordinary sense of the 
word, the sense we all understand, is unquestion- 
ably magic, whether we like it or not. He is none 
the less magic because he works through one great 
spell, and not through a host of minor, petti-fog- 
ging miracles. Upon the matter of fact we are 
all agreed, Mr. Chesterton only dissenting; but Mr. 
Wells writes as if it were an essentially godlike 
thing, and greatly to the credit of any and every 
God, to give Nature its head, and take no further 
trouble about the matter. I cannot share that 
view. My only objection to Providence is that it 
manifestly does not exist. If it did exist, and 
made the world an appreciably better place to live 
in, why should we grudge it a few miracles? 
There is a touch of the sour-grapes philosophy in 
the rationalist attitude on this matter which Mr. 
Wells attributes to his Invisible King. Because 
we can't have any miracles, we say we don't want 
them. Also, no doubt, we see that the alleged mir- 
acles of the past were childish futilities, doing at 
most a little temporary good to individuals, never 
rendering any permanent service to a city or a 
nation, and much less to mankind at large. They 
were a sort of niggardly alms from omnipotence, 
not a generous endowment or a liberal compensa- 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 69 

tion. But is that any reason why an intelligent 
Power should be unable to devise a really helpful 
miracle? Another plausible objection is that, even 
if we could admit the justice of a system of rewards 
and punishments, good and evil are so inextricably 
intermixed in this world that it is impossible to 
distribute benefits on a satisfactory moral scheme. 
It is impossible to manipulate the rainfall so that 
the righteous farmer shall have just what he wants 
at the appropriate seasons, while his wicked neigh- 
bour suffers from alternate drought and floods; nor 
can it be arranged that the midday express shall 
convey all the good people safely, while the 4.15, 
which is wrecked, carries none but undesirable char- 
acters. To this it might be replied that the in- 
conceivable complexity of the chess-board of the 
world exists only in relation to our human faculties; 
but what is far more to the point is the indubitable 
fact that many salutary miracles might be wrought 
which would raise no question whatever as to the 
moral merits or defects of the beneficiaries. Mir- 
acles of alleged justice may reasonably be depre- 
cated; but where is the objection to miracles of 
mercy, falling, like the blessed rain from heaven, 
on both just and unjust? 

The haughty soul of Mr. Wells may prefer a 



70 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

deity who offers us no tangible bribes — who not 
only does not work miracles, but will not even 
utilize to material ends that great system of wire- 
less telegraphy between his mind and ours which 
he has, by hypothesis, at his disposal. Mine, I 
confess, is a humbler spirit. I should be perfectly 
willing to accept even thaumaturgic benefits if only 
they came in my way; and I cannot regard it as a 
merit in a God that he should carefully abstain 
from using even his powers of suggestion to do 
some practical good in the world, and, incidentally, 
to demonstrate his own existence. 

It is difficult, in the course of a long discussion, 
to keep the attention fixed on the precise point at 
issue. I therefore sum up in a few words the 
argument of this chapter. 

In the first place, I have shown that, if words 
mean anything, Mr. Wells does actually wish us 
to believe that his God is not a figure of speech, 
but a person, an individual, as real and independ- 
ent an entity as the Kaiser or President Wilson. 
In the second place, I have enquired whether any- 
thing he says enables us to conceive a priori the 
possibility of such an entity disengaging itself from 



WHEN IS A GOD NOT A GOD? 71 

the mind of the race, and have regretfully been 
led to the conclusion that the genesis of this God 
remains at least as insoluble a mystery as that of any 
other God ever placed before a confiding public. 
Thirdly, I have approached the question a posteriori 
and enquired whether history or present experience 
offers any evidence from which we can reasonably 
infer the existence and activity of such a God — ar- 
riving once more at a negative conclusion. With 
the best will in the world, I can discover nothing in 
this Invisible King but a sort of new liqueur — or 
old liqueur with a new label — suited, no doubt, to 
the constitutions of certain very exceptional peo- 
ple. Mr. Wells avers that he himself finds it su- 
premely grateful and comforting, and further ap- 
peals to the testimony of a number of other 
(unnamed) believers — "English, Americans, Ben- 
galis, Russians, French . . • Positivists, Baptists, 
Sikhs, Mohammedans" (p. 4) — a quaint Pente- 
costal gathering. It is true, of course, that the 
proof of the pudding is in the eating, and of the 
liqueur in the drinking. But some of us are in- 
veterately sceptical of the virtues of alcohol, even 
in non-intoxicant doses, and are apt to think that 
the man who discovers a remedy for sea-sickness 



72 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

or a prophylactic against typhoid is a greater bene- 
factor of the race than a God whose special char- 
acteristic it is to be not only invisible himself but 
equally imperceptible in his workings. 



VI 

FOR AND AGAINST PERSONIFICATION 

FOR those of us who cannot accept Mr. 
Wells's Invisible King as a God in any 
useful or even comprehensible sense of 
the term, there remains the question whether he is 
a useful figure of speech. Metaphors and personi- 
fications are often things of great potency, whether 
for good or evil. It might quite well happen that, 
if we wholly rejected Mr. Wells's gospel, on ac- 
count of a mere squabble as to the meaning of the 
word "God," we should thereby lose something 
which might have been of the utmost value to us. 
Let us not run the risk of throwing out the baby with 
the bath-water. 

Take the case of a very similar personification 
with which we are all familiar — to wit, John Bull. 
Is he a helpful or a detrimental "synthesis"? It 
is not quite easy to say. There is a certain 
geniality, a bluff wholesomeness, a downright hon- 
esty about him, which has doubtless its value; 

73 



74 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

but on the other hand he is the incarnation of 
Philistinism and Toryism, the perfect expression 
of the average sensual man. I am told that in 
one of his avatars he has something like two mil- 
lion worshippers, on whom his influence is of the 
most questionable, precisely because they have im- 
plicit "faith" in him, and regard him as a "Friend 
behind phenomena," a "great brother," a "strongly 
marked and knowable personality, loving, inspir- 
ing, and lovable." That is an illustration of the 
dangers which may lurk in prosopopoeia. But in 
the main we can regard John Bull without too much 
misgiving, because we cannot regard him seriously. 
His worship will always be seasoned with the sav- 
ing grace of humor. He can do service in two 
capacities — sometimes as an ideal, often as a de- 
terrent. Whatever religious revolutions may await 
us, we are not likely to see St. Paul's Cathedral 
solemnly re-dedicated to the worship of John Bull. 
He and his sister divinity, Mrs. Grundy, have never 
lacked adorers in that basilica; but their cult is 
probably not on the increase. 

The Invisible King, on the other hand, is a per- 
sonage to be taken with the utmost seriousness. 
If he has anything like the success Mr. Wells an- 
ticipates for him, it is quite on the cards that he 



PERSONIFICATION 75 

might oust the present Reigning Family from one 
or all of the cathedrals. It is true that Mr. Wells 
deprecates any ritual worship; but "religious 
thought finely expressed" would always be in or- 
der; and he "does not see why there should not 
be, under God, associations for building cathedrals 
and such like great still places urgent with beauty, 
into which men and women may go to rest from 
the clamor of the day's confusions" (p. 168). If 
cathedrals may be built, all the more clearly may 
they be appropriated — if you can convert or evict 
the dean and chapter. If the Invisible King should 
take the fancy of the nation and the world, as Mr. 
Wells would have us think that he is already doing, 
he is bound to become the object of a formal cult. 
We shall very soon see a prayer-book of the "mod- 
ern religion" with marriage, funeral and perhaps 
baptismal services, with daily lessons, and with 
suitable forms of prayer for persons who cannot 
trust themselves to extempore communings even 
with a "great brother." 

Well, there might be no great harm in this. 
Some solemn form for the expression of cosmic, 
and even of mundane or political, emotion would 
doubtless be useful; and if the "modern religion" 
could be saved from degenerating into a hysterical 



76 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

superstition on the one hand, or a petrified, perse- 
cuting orthodoxy on the other, it would certainly be 
a vast improvement on many of the religions of 
to-day. 

But the ambitions of the Invisible King go far 
beyond the mere presidency of an Ethical Church 
on an extended scale. He is to be a King and no 
mistake; not even a King of Kings, but "sole 
Monarch of the universal earth." Autocracies, 
oligarchies, and democracies are alike to be swept 
out of his path. The "implicit command" of the 
modern religion "to all its adherents is to make 
plain the way to the world theocracy" (p. 97). 
How the fiats of the Invisible King are to be issued, 
we are not informed. If through the ballot-box — 
"vox populi, vox dei" — then the distinction be- 
tween theocracy and democracy will scarcely be 
apparent to the naked eye. And one does not see 
how, in the transition stage at any rate, recourse to 
the ballot-box is to be avoided, if only as a lesser 
evil than recourse to howitzers, tanks and subma- 
rines. We read that "if you do not feel God then 
there is no persuading you of him"; but if you 
do, "you will realize more and more clearly, that 
thus and thus and no other is his method and in- 
tention" (p. 98). Now, assuming (no slight as- 



PERSONIFICATION 77 

sumption) that the oracles of God, the message of 
the still small voice, will be identically interpreted 
by all believers, the unbelievers, those who "do not 
feel God," have still to be dealt with; and, as 
they are not open to persuasion, it would seem that 
the faithful must be prepared either to shoot them 
down or to vote them down — whereof the latter 
seems the humaner alternative. It is true that Mr. 
Wells's God is a man of war; like that other whom 
he disowns but strangely resembles, "he brings 
mankind not rest but a sword" (p. 96). But we 
may confidently hold that this, at any rate, is but 
a manner of speaking. Even if the God is real, 
his sword is metaphoric. Mr. Wells is not seri- 
ously proposing to take his cue from his Moham- 
medan friends, raise the cry of "Allahu Akbar!" 
and propagate his gospel scimitar in hand. It is 
hard to see, then, what other method there can be of 
dealing with the heathen, except the method of the 
ballot-box — of course with proportional representa- 
tion. When there are no more heathen — when the 
whole world can read the will of God by direct in- 
tuition, as though it were written in letters of fire 
across the firmament — then, indeed, the ballot-box 
may join the throne, sceptre and crown in the his- 
torical museum. But even the robust optimism of 



78 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

the gottestrunken Mr. Wells can scarcely conceive 
this millennium to be at hand. So that in the 
meantime it seems unwise to speak slightingly of 
democracy, lest we thereby help the Powers, both 
here and elsewhere, which are fighting for some- 
thing very much worse. For I take it that the worst 
enemy of the Wellsian God is the Superman, who 
has quite a sporting chance of coming out on top, 
if not actually in this War, at least in the welter 
that will succeed it. 

But seriously, is any conceivable sort of theoc- 
racy a desirable ideal? Or, to put the same ques- 
tion in more general terms, is it wise of Mr. Wells 
to make such play with the word "God"? He 
himself admits that "God trails with him a thousand 
misconceptions and bad associations: his alleged 
infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange prefer- 
ences, his vindictive Old Testament past" (p. 8) — 
and, it may fairly be added, his blood-boltered, 
Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to deodorize 
a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick 
stupefying incense-smoke,' 9 mingled with the reek 
of the auto-da-fe? Can we beat into a plough- 
share the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thou- 
sand other deeds of horror? God has been by far 
the most tragic word in the whole vocabulary of 



PERSONIFICATION 79 

the race — a spell to conjure up all the worst fiends 
in human nature: arrogance and abjectness, fana- 
ticism, hatred and atrocity. Religious reformers — 
with Jesus at their head — have time and again 
tried to divest it of some, at least, of its terrors, 
but they have invariably failed. Will Mr. Wells 
succeed any better? Is it not apparent in the fore- 
going discussion that, even if the word had no 
other demerits, it leads us into regions in which 
the mind can find no firm foothold? I have done 
my best to accept Mr. Wells's definitions, but I 
am sure he feels that I have constantly slipped 
from the strait and narrow path. Has he him- 
self always kept to it? I think not. And, waiving 
that point, is it at all likely that people in general 
will be more successful than I have been in grasp- 
ing and holding fast to the differentiating attri- 
butes of Mr. Wells's divinity? If the word is at 
best a confusion and at worst a war-whoop, should 
we not try to dispense with it, to avoid it, to find 
a substitute which should more accurately, if less 
truculently, express our idea? Is it wise or kind 
to seek to impose on the future an endless struggle 
with its sinister ambiguities? 

There are, no doubt, regions of thought from 
which it is extremely difficult to exclude the word; 



80 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

but these, fortunately, are regions in which it is 
almost necessarily divested of its historical asso- 
ciations. As a term of pure philosophy, if safe- 
guarded by careful definition, it is a convenient 
piece of shorthand, obviating the necessity for a 
constant recourse to cumbrous formulas. But poli- 
tics is not one of these regions of thought; and it is 
precisely in politics that the intervention of God 
has from of old been most disastrous. "Theoc- 
racy" has always been the synonym for a bleak 
and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, 
tyranny. Why seek to revive and rehabilitate a 
word of such a dismal connotation? I suggest that 
even if the Invisible King were a God, it would be 
tactful to pretend that he was not. As he is not a 
God, in any generally understood sense of the 
term, it seems a curious perversity to pretend that 
he is. 

Even in the region of morals it is a backward 
step to restore God to the supremacy from which 
he has with the utmost difficulty been deposed. I 
am sure Mr. Wells does not in his heart believe 
that any theological sanction is required for the 
plain essentials of social well-doing, or any theo- 
logical stimulus for the rare sublimities of virtue. 



PERSONIFICATION 81 

Incalculable mischief has been wrought by the 
clerical endeavour to set up a necessary association 
between right conduct and orthodoxy, between 
heterodoxy and vice. This Mr. Wells knows as 
well as I do; yet he can use such phrases as "With- 
out God, the 'Service of Man' is no better than a 
hobby or a sentimentality or a hypocrisy." No 
doubt he has carefully explained that he does not 
mean by God or religion what the clergy mean; 
but can he be sure that by imitating their phrases 
he may not imperceptibly slide into their frame of 
mind? or at any rate tempt the weaker brethren 
to do so? In using such an expression he comes 
perilously near the attitude adopted by the Bishop 
of London in a recent address to the sailors of the 
Grand Fleet. His Lordship told his hearers — we 
have it on his own authority — that "there was in 
everyone a good man and a bad man. And I have 
not known a case," he added, "where the good 
man conquered the bad man without religion." 
Can there be any doubt that the Bishop was either 
telling — well, not the truth — or shamelessly play- 
ing with words? Of course it may be said that 
any man who keeps his lower instincts in control 
does so by aid of a feeling that there are higher 
values in life than sensual gratification or direct 



82 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

self -gratification of any sort; and we may, if we 
are so minded, call this feeling religion. But it 
is a very inconvenient meaning to attach to the 
word, and we cannot take it to be the meaning 
the Bishop had in view. What he meant, in all 
probability — what he desired his simple-minded 
hearers to understand — was that he had never 
known a good man who did not believe, if not in 
all the dogmas of the Church of England, at any 
rate in the Christian Trinity, the fall of man, re- 
demption from sin, and the inspiration of the 
Scriptures. He meant that no man could be good 
who did not believe that God has given us in writ- 
ing a synopsis of his plan of world-government, 
and has himself sojourned on earth and submitted 
to an appearance of death, some two thousand 
years ago, in fulfilment of the said plan. If he did 
not mean that, he was, I repeat, playing with 
words and deceiving his hearers, who would cer- 
tainly understand him to mean something to that 
effect; and if he did mean that, he departed very 
palpably from the truth. The Bishop of London 
is no recluse, shut up in a monastery among men 
of his own faith. He is a man of the modern 
world, and he must know, and know that he knows, 
scores of men as good as himself who have no be- 



PERSONIFICATION 83 

lief in anything that he would recognize as re- 
ligion. Perhaps he was not directly conscious of 
telling a falsehood, for "faith" plays such havoc 
with the intellect that men cease to attach any living 
meaning to words, and come to deal habitually in 
those unrealized phrases which we call cant. But 
whatever may have been his excuses to his con- 
science, he was saying a very noxious thing to the 
simple, gallant souls who heard him. Many of 
them must have been well aware that they had no 
faith that would have satisfied the Bishop of Lon- 
don, and that whatever religious ideas lurked in 
their minds were of very little use to them in strug- 
gling with the temptations of a sailor's life. 
Where was the sense in telling them that the ordi- 
nary motives which make for good conduct — 
prudence, self-respect, loyalty, etc., etc. — are of no 
avail, and that they must inevitably be bad men if 
they had not "found religion"? If such talk does 
no positive harm, it is only because men have learnt 
to discount the patter of theology. Yet here we 
find Mr. Wells, after vigorously disclaiming any 
participation in the Bishop's beliefs, falling into 
the common form of episcopal patter, and telling 
me, for example — a benighted but quite well-in- 
tentioned heathen — that I can do no good in my 



84 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

generation unless I believe in a God whom he and 
a number of Eastern sages, Parthians, Medes, 
Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, have re- 
cently " synthetized" out of their inner conscious- 
nesses! It is not Mr. Wells's fault if I do not aban- 
don the steep and thorny track of austerity which I 
have hitherto pursued, invest all my spare cash 
either in whiskey or in whiskey shares, and go for 
my philosophy in future to the inspiring author of 
Musings without Method in "Blackwood." 

It is not quite clear why Mr. Wells should accept 
so large a part of the Christian ethic and yet re- 
fuse to identify his Invisible King with Christ. 
One would have supposed it quite as easy to divest 
the Christ-figure of any inconvenient attributes as 
to eliminate omniscience and omnipotence from 
the God-idea. Mr. Wells constantly allows his 
thoughts to run into the stereotype moulds of 
biblical phraseology. We have seen how he talks 
of "the still small voice," of "the light of the 
world," "taking the sting from death" and of God 
coming "in his own time" and bringing "not rest 
but a sword." To those instances may be added 
such phrases as "death will be swallowed up in 
victory" (p. 39), "by the grace of the true God" 
(p. 44), "God is Love" (p. 65), "the Son of Man" 



PERSONIFICATION 85 

(p. 86), "I become my brother's keeper" (p. 97), 
"he it is who can deliver us 'from the body of this 
death'" (p. 99). But the clearest indication of 
Christian influence is to be found in Mr. Wells's 
unhesitating and emphatic adoption of the idea that 
"Salvation is indeed to lose oneself" (p. 73). 
"The difference," he says, "between . . . the un- 
believer and the servant of the true God is this . . . 
that the latter has experienced a complete turning 
away from self. This only difference is all the 
difference in the world" (p. 84). It is curious 
what a fascination this turn of phrase has exercised 
upon many and diverse intelligences. Mr. Bernard 
Shaw, for instance, adopts it with enthusiasm. 
Henrik Ibsen — if it is ever possible to tie a true 
dramatist down to a doctrine — preaches in Peer 
Gynt that "to be thyself is to slay thyself." Mr. 
Wells has a cloud of witnesses to back him up ; and 
yet it is very doubtful whether the turn of phrase 
is a really helpful one — whether it does not rather 
get in the way of the natural man in his quest for a 
sound rule of life. 

It is a commonplace that the entirely self-centred 
man — the Robinson Crusoe of a desert island of 
egoism — is unhappy. At least if he is not he 
belongs to a low intellectual and moral type: the 



86 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

proof being that all development above the level of 
the oyster and the slug has involved more or less 
surrender of the immediate claims of "number 
one" to some larger unity. Progress has always 
consisted, and still consists, in the widening of the 
ideal concept which appeals to our loyalty. Is it 
not Mr. Wells's endeavour in this very book to claim 
our devotion for the all-embracing and ultimate 
ideal — the human race? So far, we are all at one. 
But when we are told that "conversion" or "salva- 
tion" consists in a "complete turning away from 
self," common sense revolts. It is not true either 
in every-day life or in larger matters of conduct. 
In every-day life the incurably "unselfish" person 
is an intolerable nuisance. Here the common-sense 
rule is very simple: you have no right to seek your 
own "salvation," or, in non-theological terms, your 
own self -approval, at the cost of other people's ; you 
have no business to offer sacrifices which the other 
party ought not to accept. It is true that in the 
application of this simple rule difficult problems 
may arise; but a little tact will generally go a long 
way towards solving them. In these matters an 
ounce of tact is worth a pound of casuistry. And 
in our every-day England, in all classes, it is my 
profound conviction that a reasonable selflessness 



PERSONIFICATION 87 

is very far from uncommon, very far from being 
confined to the "converted" of any religion. For 
forty years I have watched it growing and spread- 
ing before my very eyes. Reading the other way 
The Roundabout Papers, I was greatly struck by 
the antiquated cast of the manners therein de- 
scribed. Of course Thackeray, in his day, was re- 
puted a cynic, and supposed to have an over-par- 
tiality for studying the seamy side of things. But 
even if that had been true (which I do not believe) 
it would not have accounted for all the difference 
between the world he saw and that in which we 
move to-day. I suggest, then, that so far as the 
minor moralities are concerned, no new religion is 
required, and we have only to let things pursue their 
natural trend. 

And what of the great selflessnesses? What of 
the ideal loyalties? What of the long-accumulated 
instincts which tell a man, in tones which brook 
no contradiction, that the shortest life and the 
cruellest death are better than the longest life of 
sensual self -contempt? Here, as it seems to me, 
Mr. Wells's apostolate of a new religion is very 
conspicuously superfluous — much more so than it 
would have been five years ago. For have not he 
and I been privileged to witness one of the most 



88 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

beautiful sights that the world ever saw — the flock- 
ing of Young England, in its hundreds upon hun- 
dreds of thousands, to endure the extremity of 
hardship and face the high probability of a cruel 
death, not for England alone, not even for Eng- 
land, France and Belgium, but for what they ob- 
scurely but very potently felt to be the highest in- 
terests of the very same ideal entity which Mr. 
Wells proposes to our devotion — the human race? 
I am sure he would be the last to minimize the 
significance of that splendid uprising. No doubt 
there were other motives at work: in some, the mere 
love of change and adventure; in others, the pres- 
sure of public opinion. But my own observation 
assures me that, on the whole, these unideal motives 
played a very small part. The young men simply 
felt that he who held back was unfaithful to his 
fathers and unworthy of his sons; and they "turned 
away from self" without a moment's hesitation, 
and streamed to the colors with all the more eager- 
ness the longer the casualty -lists grew, and the more 
clearly the horrors they had to face were brought 
home to them. Has there been any voluntary 
"slaying of self" on so huge a scale since the world 
began? I have not heard of it. And Mr. Wells 
will scarcely tell me that these young men went 



PERSONIFICATION 89 

through the experiences he describes as "conver- 
sion," and escaped from the burden of "over-indi- 
viduation" by throwing themselves into the arms of 
a synthetic God ! Many of them, no doubt, would 
have expressed their idealism, had they expressed 
it at all, in terms of Christianity; but that, we are 
told, is a delusion, and the only true God is the In- 
visible King. If that be so, the conclusion would 
seem to be that, in the present stage of the evolu- 
tion of human character, no God at all is needed to 
enable millions of men, in whom the blood runs 
high and the joy of life is at its keenest, to achieve 
the conquest of self in one of its noblest forms. 
Or (what comes to the same thing) any sort of God 
will serve the purpose. Your God (divested of 
metaphysical attributes) is simply a name for your 
own better instincts and impulses. Many people, 
perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency to ex- 
ternalize, objectivate, personify these impulses; and 
there may be no harm in doing so. But when it 
comes to asserting that your own personification is 
the only true one, then — I am not so sure. 

Finally there arises the question whether the 
personification of the Invisible King can really, in 
any comprehensible sense, and for any consider- 
able number of normal human beings, rob death 



90 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

of its sting, the grave of its victory? On this 
point discussion cannot possibly be conclusive, for 
the ultimate test is necessarily a personal one. If 
any sane and sincere person tells me that a certain 
idea, or emotion, or habit of mind, or even any 
rite or incantation, has deprived death of its ter- 
rors for him, I can only congratulate him, even if I 
have to confess that my own experience gives me 
no clue to his meaning. It is not even very profit- 
able to enquire whether a man can be confident 
of his own attitude towards death unless he has 
either come very close to its brink himself, or 
known what it means to witness the extinction of 
a life on which his whole joy in the present and 
hope for the future depended. All one can do is 
to try to ascertain as nearly as possible what the 
contemner of death really means, and to consider 
whether his individual experience or feeling is, or 
is likely to become, typical. 

One thing we must plainly realize, and that is 
that, for the purposes of his present argument, 
Mr. Wells conceives death to be a real extinction 
of the individual consciousness. He does not 
formally commit himself to a denial of personal 
immortality, but it is a contingency which he de- 
clines to take into account. Oddly enough, in 



PERSONIFICATION 91 

trying to acclimatize our minds to the idea of such 
an absolutely incorporeal and immaterial, yet 
really existent, being as his Invisible King, he 
comes near to clearing away the one great obstacle 
to belief in survival after death. "From the 
earliest ages," he says, "man's mind has found 
little or no difficulty in the idea of something essen- 
tial to the personality, a soul or a spirit or both, 
existing apart from the body and continuing after 
the destruction of the body, and being still a person 
and an individual" (p. 59). He does not actually 
say that there is no difficulty about this conception: 
he only says that, as a matter of history, the great 
mass of men have found it easy and natural to be- 
lieve in ghosts. But it is hard to see any force in 
his argument at this point unless he means to 
imply that he himself finds "little or no difficulty" 
in conceiving the continued existence of a 
spiritual consciousness and individuality after the 
dissolution of the body to which it has been at- 
tached; and if he does mean this, it is hard to 
see why he does not take his stand beside Sir 
Oliver Lodge on the spiritist platform. To many 
of us, the extreme difficulty of such a conception 
is the one great barrier to the acceptance of the 
spiritist theory, for which remarkable evidence can 



92 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

certainly be adduced. This, however, is a digres- 
sion. So far as God the Invisible King is con- 
cerned, Mr. Wells must be taken as ignoring, if 
not rejecting, the idea of personal immortality. 

The victory over death, then, which the Invisible 
King is said to achieve, does not consist in its aboli- 
tion. It may probably be best defined as the per- 
fect reconcilement of the believer to the extinction 
of his individual consciousness. And what are 
the grounds of that reconcilement? Let us search 
the scriptures. Where the steps are described by 
which the catechumen approaches the full realiza- 
tion of God, it is said that at that stage he 
feels that "if there were such a being he would 
supply the needed consolation and direction, his 
continuing purpose would knit together the scat- 
tered effort of life, his immortality would take the 
sting from death" (p. 21-22) . A little further on, 
the idea is elaborated in a high strain of mysticism. 
God, who "captains us but does not coddle us" (p. 
42), will by no means undertake to hold the be- 
liever scatheless among the pitfalls and perils that 
beset our earthly pilgrimage. "But God will be 
with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane, or 
the dark ice-cave, God will be your courage. 
Though you suffer or are killed, it is not an end. 



PERSONIFICATION 93 

He will be with you as you face death; he will die 
with you as he has died already countless myriads 
of brave deaths. He will come so close to you that 
at the last you will not know whether it is you or 
he who dies, and the present death will be swal- 
lowed up in his victory" (p. 39). The passage 
has already been quoted in which it is written that, 
at the end of the fight for God's Kingdom, "we 
are altogether taken up into his being" (p. 68). 
In a discussion of "the religion of atheists" we are 
told that unregenerate man is "acutely aware of 
himself as an individual and unawakened to him- 
self as a species," wherefore he "finds death frus- 
tration." His mistake is in not seeing that his 
own frustration "may be the success and triumph of 
his kind" (p. 72) . At the point where we are told 
that "the first purpose of God is the attainment of 
clear knowledge," we are further informed that 
"he will apprehend more fully as time goes on" 
the purpose to which this knowledge is to be ap- 
plied. But already it is possible to define "the 
broad outlines" of his purpose. "It is the con- 
quest of death; first the overcoming of death in the 
individual by the incorporation of the motives of 
his life into an undying purpose" (p. 99), and 
then, as we saw before, the defeat of the threat- 



94 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

ened extinction of life through the cooling of the 
planet. These, I think, are the chief texts bearing 
directly on this particular matter; but there is one 
other remark which must not be overlooked. "A 
convicted criminal, frankly penitent," we are told, 
". . . may still die well and bravely on the gal- 
lows, to the glory of God. He may step straight 
from that death into the immortal being of God." 

To what, now, does all this amount? Is there 
any more substantial solace in it than in the "Oh, 
may I join the Choir Invisible" aspiration of mid- 
nineteenth-century positivism? Far be it from 
me to speak contemptuously of that aspiration. 
It gives a new orientation and consistency to 
thought and effort during life; and to the man 
who feels that his little note will melt into the 
world-harmony that is to be, that thought may 
impart a certain serenity under the shadow of the 
end. It is certainly better to feel at night, "I 
have done a fair day's work," than to lie down 
with the confession, "My day has been wasted, 
and worse." No one wants, I suppose, to say 
with Peer Gynt: — 

Thou beautiful earth, be not angry with me. 

That I trampled thy grasses to no avail; 

Thou beautiful sun, thou hast squandered away 



PERSONIFICATION 95 

Thy glory of light in an empty hut. 

Beautiful sun and beautiful earth, 

You were foolish to bear and give light to my mother. 

But there is also another side to the question. 
The more surely you believe that "through the 
ages one increasing purpose runs" — the more 
intimately you have merged your individual will 
in what Mr, Wells would call the will of the In- 
visible King — the less do you relish the thought 
that you can never see that will worked out. The 
intenser your interest in the play, the greater your 
disinclination to leave the theatre just as the plot 
is thickening. Nor does it afford much consolation 
to know that the Producer is just (as it were) 
getting into his stride, and that, if the house 
should become too cold for comfort, arrangements 
will be made for the transference of the production 
to another theatre, with a better heating- 
apparatus. 

Is there any real escape from the fact that for 
each of us the one thing that actually exists is our 
individual consciousness? It is our universe; and 
if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular 
universe is no more. If its limits of "individua- 
tion" are irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell 
us that the flame is absorbed into the light of the 



96 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

world or the dayspring on high? Is it possible 
to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the 
Atlantic thrills with a great rapture as its mole- 
cules disperse in the moment of coalescence, be- 
cause it is now part of an infinite and immortal 
entity? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing 
that its "chagrins of egotism," as an individual 
drop, are now over; in fact, this is precisely the 
sort of thing that some poets love to imagine; but 
has it any real relevance to our sublunary lot? 
Can it minister any substantial comfort or forti- 
fication to the normal man in the moment of peril 
or agony? I ask; I do not answer. Can Mr. 
Wells put in the witness-box any flight-lieutenant 
who will swear that in his reeling aeroplane, as 
death seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt 
uncertain whether it was God or he that was about 
to die, and gloriously certain that in any case he 
was about to "step straight into the immortal 
being of God"? And even if, in the excitement of 
violent action, such hallucinations do mean some- 
thing to a peculiar type of mind, has any one dying 
of pneumonia or Bright's disease been known to 
declare that, though his mortal spark was on the 
point of extinction, he felt that "by the incor- 
poration of the motives of his life into an undying 



PERSONIFICATION 97 

purpose" he had triumphed over death and the 
grave? The simple soul who says "We shall meet 
in Heaven" no doubt enjoys such a triumph — and 
even if he fails to keep the appointment, no one 
is any the worse. But where are the men and 
women who feel the immortality of God, however 
we define or construct him, a rich compensation 
for their own mortality? 

It may be said that I am applying shockingly 
terrestrial tests to Mr. Wells's soaring transcen- 
dentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they 
work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have 
called a luxury for the intellectually wealthy. It 
must be within the reach of plain men and women; 
and plain men and women cannot, as the French 
say, "pay themselves with words." Take them 
all round, they do not make too much of death. 
With or without the aid of religion, they generally 
meet it with tolerable fortitude. But it will be 
hard to persuade them that annihilation is a thing 
to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic God 
is indestructible; or that death is not death because 
other people will be alive a hundred or a thousand 
years hence. Even if you cannot offer them 
another life, you may tell them of the grave as a 
place where the wicked cease from troubling and 



98 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

the weary are at rest, and they will understand. 
But will they understand if you tell them that we 
triumph over the grave because God dies with us 
and yet never dies? I fear it will need something 
clearer and more credible than this to make the 
undertaker a popular functionary. 

The doctrines of "the modern religion" may 
give us a new motive for living; but how can they 
at the same time diminish our distaste for dying? 
That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases 
where we felt that our death was promoting some 
great and sacred cause more than our life could 
have done; but such cases must always be ex- 
tremely rare. Even the soldier on the battlefield 
will help his country more by living than by dying, 
if he can do so without failing in his duty. His 
death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than 
cowardice and disgrace. And what shall we say, 
for example, of the case of a young biologist who 
dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and 
beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which 
the modern God might with advantage have 
swerved from his principles and (for once) played 
the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, 
to die in a good cause than to throw away life 



PERSONIFICATION 99 

in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it not playing 
with words to say that even the end of a martyr 
to science like Captain Scott, or a martyr to 
humanity like Edith Cavell, is a triumph over 
death and the grave? It is a triumph over 
cowardice, baseness, the love of ease and safety, 
all the paltrier aspects of our nature; but a 
triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which 
I do not believe) that German soldiers sign a dec- 
laration devoting the glycerine in their dead 
bodies to their country's service, one may imagine 
that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in 
resolving upon this final proof of patriotism; but 
it will be a gloomy satisfaction at best; there will 
be a lack of exhilaration about it; if the Herr 
Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures con- 
gratulates them on having triumphed over death, 
they will be apt to think it a rather empty form 
of words. If they had had the advantage of read- 
ing Jane Austen, they would probably say with 
Mr. Bennet, "Let us take a more cheerful view 
of the subject, and suppose that I survive." 

I fear that not even the companionship offered 
by the modern God in the act of dissolution will 
make death a cheerful experience, or induce 



100 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mor- 
tality. It is too much the habit of Gods to pretend 
to die when they don't really die at all — when, in 
fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual hocus- 
pocus. 



VII 

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 

WHY has Mr. Wells partly goaded and 
partly hypnotized himself into the be- 
lief that he is the predestined prolocu- 
tor of a new hocus-pocus? Rightly or wrongly, 
I diagnose his case thus: What he really cares 
for is the future of humanity, or, in more concrete 
language, social betterment. He suffers more than 
most of us from the spectacle of the world of to- 
day, because he has the constructive imagination 
which can place alongside of that chaos of cupidi- 
ties and stupidities a vision of a rational world- 
order which seems easily attainable if only some 
malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of 
man. But he finds himself impotent in face of 
the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the 
gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for 
the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen 
of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; 
he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile 

101 



102 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won 
for him a great public, both in Europe and Amer- 
ica; yet he feels that his social philosophy, his 
ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more 
impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear 
of a drowsy mastodon. At the same time he has 
persuaded himself, whether on internal or on ex- 
ternal evidence — partly, I daresay, on both — that 
men cannot thrive, either as individuals or as 
world-citizens, without some relation of reverence 
and affection to something outside and above them- 
selves. He foresees that Christianity will come 
bankrupt out of the War, and yet that the huge, 
shattering experience will throw the minds of men 
open to spiritual influences. At the same time (of 
this one could point to several incidental evidences) 
he has come a good deal in contact with Indian 
religiosity, and learnt to know a type of mind to 
which God, in one form or another, is indeed an 
essential of life, while the particular form is a 
matter of comparative indifference. Then the idea 
strikes him: "Have we not here a great opportunity 
for placing the motive-power of spiritual fervor 
behind, or within, the sluggish framework of social 
idealism? Here it lies, well thought-out, carefully 
constructed, but inert, like an aeroplane without an 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 103 

engine. By giving the glow of supernaturalism, of 
the worship of a personal God, to the good old 
Religion of Humanity, may we not impart to our 
schemes for a well-ordered world precisely the up- 
lift they at present lack? It was all very well for 
chilly New England transcendentalism to 'hitch its 
waggon to a star/ but the result is that Boston is 
governed by a Roman Catholic Archbishop. It is 
really much easier and more effective to hitch our 
waggon to God, who, being a synthesis of our 
own higher selves, will naturally pull it in whatever 
direction we want. Thus the mass of mankind 
will escape from that spiritual loneliness which is 
so discomfortable to them, and will find, in one 
and the same personification, a deity to listen to 
their prayers, and a 'boss,' in the Tammany sense 
of the term, to herd them to the polling-booths. 
What we want is collectivism touched with emo- 
tion. By proclaiming it to be the will of God, and 
identifying sound politics with ecstatic piety, we 
may shorten by several centuries the path to a 
new world-order." 

This is a translation into plain English of the 
thoughts which would seem to have possessed Mr. 
Wells's mind during the past year or so. I do not 
for a moment mean that he put them to himself 



104 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

in plain English. That would be to accuse him of 
insincerity — a thought which I most sincerely dis- 
claim. I have not the least doubt that the In- 
visible King does actually supply a "felt want" 
in his spiritual outfit, and that he is perfectly con- 
vinced that most other people are similarly con- 
stituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty 
and devotion. Time will show whether his psychol- 
ogy is correct. If it is, then he has indeed made 
an important discovery. To use a very homely 
illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a 
stick before a donkey's nose makes no mechanical 
difference in the problem of traction presented by 
the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds 
to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it 
cheers, heartens, and inspires the donkey, helping 
him to overcome those fits of lethargy so charac- 
teristic of his race, then the carrot may quite 
appreciably accelerate the general rate of prog- 
ress. It all depends on the psychology of the 
donkey. 

Moses doubtless did very wisely in going up 
into Mount Sinai and abiding there forty days and 
forty nights. Whatever he may have seen and 
heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher 
Power unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 105 

of social reform which it could never have attained 
had he offered it on its inherent merits, as the pro- 
ject of a mere human legislator, or (still worse) 
of a man of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his 
Children of Israel. Does Mr. Wells know his 
modern Englishmen or Anglo-Americans? 

That is the question. 

Mr. Bernard Shaw has made a similar and very- 
ingenious attempt, not exactly to found a new 
religion, but to place his ideas in a religious atmos- 
phere. In the preface to Androcles and the Lion 
(a disquisition just about as long as God the In- 
visible King) he propounds the question, "Why 
not give Christianity a trial?" and opens the dis- 
cussion thus: "The question seems a hopeless one 
after 2,000 years of resolute adherence to the old 
cry of 4 Not this man, but Barabbas.' Yet it is 
beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in 
spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his 
empires, his millions of money, and his moralities 
and churches and political constitutions. 'This 
man' has not been a failure yet; for nobody has 
ever been sane enough to try his way." Then he 
goes on to shew, by a course of very plausible 
reasoning, that the teaching of Jesus was, in all 
essentials, an exact anticipation of the economic 



106 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

and social philosophy of G. B. S.; so that, in 
giving political expression to that philosophy, we 
should be, for the first time, establishing the King- 
dom of Christ upon earth. It is true that there 
are passages in the Gospels which no more accord 
with Mr. Shaw's sociology than do omnipotence 
and omniscience with the theology of Mr. Wells. 
But these passages do not embarrass Mr. Shaw. 
He simply points out that, at Matthew xvi, 16, 
where Peter hailed him as "the Christ, the Son of 
the living God," Jesus went mad. Up to that 
fatal moment "his history is that of a man sane 
and interesting apart from his special gifts as 
orator, healer and prophet"; but from that point 
onward he set to work to live up to "his destiny 
as a god," part of which was to be killed and to 
rise again. Many other prophets have gone mad — 
for instance, Ruskin and Nietzsche. Therefore we 
can have no difficulty in simply eliminating as a 
morbid aberration whatever is un-Shavian in the 
message of Jesus, and accepting the rest as the 
sincere milk of the word. Mr. Shaw's attempt to 
place his philosophy under divine patronage is not 
so serious as Mr. Wells's; for Mr. Shaw can never 
take himself quite seriously for five pages to- 
gether. But the motive, in each case, in mani- 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 107 

festly the same — to obtain for a system of ideas 
the prestige, the power of insinuation, penetration, 
and stimulation, that attaches to the very name of 
religion. 

The notion is a very tempting one. What every 
prophet wants, in the babel of latter-day thought, 
is a magic sounding-board which shall make his 
voice carry to the ends of the earth and penetrate 
to the dullest understanding. The more he be- 
lieves in his own reason, the more he yearns for 
some method of out-shouting the unreason of his 
neighbours. German philosophy thought it had 
discovered the ideal reverberator in the artillery 
of Herr Krupp von Bohlen; but the world is 
curiously indisposed to conversion by cannon, and 
has retorted in a still louder roar of high-explosive 
arguments. God, as a politico-philosophical ally, 
is certainly cheaper than Herr Krupp; and, 
divested of his mediaeval sword and tinder-box, he 
is decidedly humaner. But is the glamour of his 
name quite what it once was? Or can it be re- 
stored to its pristine potency? 

On a question, such as this, on which the evi- 
dence is too vague, too voluminous and too com- 
plex to be interpreted with any certainty, our 
wishes are apt to take control of our thoughts. 



108 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

Making all allowance for this source of error, I 
nevertheless venture to suggest to Mr. Wells that 
we may perhaps be passing out of, not into, an 
age of religiosity. May it not be that the time has 
come to give the name of God a rest? Is it not 
possible, and even probable, that, while the vast 
apocalypse of the observatory and the laboratory 
is proceeding with unexampled speed, thinking 
people may prefer to await its developments, 
rather than pin their faith to an interim, synthetic 
God, whom his own still, small voice must, in 
moments of candor, confess to be merely make- 
believe? Is it the fact that men, or even women, 
of our race are, as a rule, absolutely dependent for 
courage, energy, self-control and self-devotion, 
upon some "great brother" outside themselves, 
"a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring 
and lovable," whom they conceive to be always 
within call? In making this assumption, is not 
Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism 
in the world around him — not all of it, or even 
most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but 
none the less real on that account? He makes a 
curious remark as to the personage whom he calls 
"the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 109 

nickname for the man who is not much interested 
in midway Gods between himself and the Veiled 
Being, This hapless fellow-creature, says Mr. 
Wells, "has not really given himself or got away 
from himself. He has no one to whom he can 
give himself. He is still a masterless man' 9 (p. 
83) . As Mr. Wells has evidently read a good deal 
about Japan, he no doubt takes this expression 
from Japanese feudalism, which made a distinct 
class of the "ronin" or masterless man, who had, 
by death or otherwise, lost his feudal superior. 
But is it really, to our Western sense, a misfortune 
to be a masterless man? Does the healthy human 
spirit suffer from having no one to bow down to, 
no one to relieve it of the burden of choice, re- 
sponsibility, self-control? If our feudal allegiance 
has terminated through the death of the Gods who 
asserted a hereditary claim upon it, must we make 
haste to build ourselves an idol, or synthetize a 
mosaic ikon, to serve as the recipient of our 
obeisances, genuflexions, osculations? I cannot 
believe that this is a general, and much less a uni- 
versal, tendency. If any one is irked by the con- 
dition of a "masterless man," the Roman Catholic 
Church holds wide its doors for him. It seems very 



110 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

doubtful whether any less ancient, dogmatic, 
hieratic, spectacular form of make-believe will 
serve his turn. 

It has sometimes seemed to me that the one 
great advantage of Western Christianity lies in 
the fact that nobody very seriously believes in it. 
"Nobody" is not a mathematically accurate ex- 
pression, but it is quite in the line of the truth. 
You have to go to Asia to find out what religion 
means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve 
as a half-way house; but to study religion on its 
native heath, so to speak, you must go to India. 
Of course there may be some illusion in the matter, 
due to one's ignorance of the languages and in- 
ability to estimate the exact spiritual significance 
of outward manifestations; but I cannot believe 
that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there 
exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any 
real effective dependence on any outward Power 
"dal tetto in su," which is so common in and 
around all Christian churches. In China and 
Japan it is another matter. There, I fancy, re- 
ligious "ronins" are common enough. But in the 
lands of the Crescent and the land of "OM," 
anything like freedom of the human spirit is prob- 
ably very rare and very difficult. The difference 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 111 

does not arise from any lesser stringency in the 
claims of Christianity to spiritual dominion, but 
rather, I imagine, from a deep-seated divergence 
in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have be- 
hind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of 
Greece and Rome. We are accustomed from child- 
hood to the knowledge that our civilization was 
founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, 
to whom the religions of their day were, as they 
are to us, nothing but more or less graceful fairy- 
tales. 1 We know that many of the greatest men 
the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation 
to the "deus absconditus" in various ways, were 
utterly free from that penitential, supplicatory 
abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvation- 
ism. And though of course the conscious filiation 
to Greece and Rome is rare, the habit of mind 
which holds up its head in the world and feels no 
childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is 
not rare at all. Therefore I conceive that people 
who are shaken out of their conventional, un- 
realized Christianity by the earthquake of the war 
will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into 

i Namque deos didici securum agere aevum, 
nee, siquid miri faciat natura, deos id 
tristes ex alto caeli demittere tecto. 

Horace, Satires I., 5. 



112 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

the arms of the "great brother" constructed for 
them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to picture them 
flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus — the 
Christ uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of Mr. 
Bernard Shaw. 

Does it really seem to Mr. Wells an arid and 
damnable "atheism" that finds in the very mys- 
tery of existence a subject of contemplation so 
inexhaustibly marvellous as to give life the fascina- 
tion of a detective story? When Mr. Wells tells 
us that "the first purpose of God is the attain- 
ment of clear knowledge, of knowledge as a means 
to more knowledge, and of knowledge as a means 
to power," he states what is, to many of us, the 
first and last article of religion — only that we pre- 
fer to steer clear of hocus-pocus and substitute 
"Man" for "God." If we are almost, or even 
quite, reconciled to the cruelties and humiliations 
of life by the thought of its visual glories, its in- 
tellectual triumphs, and the mysteries with which 
it is surrounded, is that frame of mind wholly un- 
worthy to be called religious? If it is, I, for one, 
shall not complain; for religion, like God, is a 
word that has been — 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 113 

Defamed by every charlatan 
And soil'd with all ignoble use. 

But it will be difficult to persuade me of the loftier 
spirituality, or even the more abiding solace, in- 
volved in ecstatic devotion to a figure of speech. 

There are two elements of consolation in life: 
the things of which we are sure, and the things 
of which we are unsure. We are sure that man 
has somehow been launched upon the most 
romantic adventure that mind can conceive. He 
has set forth to conquer and subdue the world, 
including the stupidities and basenesses of his own 
nature. At first his progress was incalculably 
slow; then he came on with a rush in the great 
sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the 
brine of the JEgean got into his blood, he achieved 
such miracles of thought and art that his subse- 
quent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, 
bore the appearance of retrogression. I have 
already asked what the Invisible King was about 
when he suffered the glory that was Athens to 
sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all 
events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing. 
Rome succeeded to the world-leadership; and 
Rome, though energetic and capable, was never 



114 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

brilliant. With her, European free thought, in- 
vestigation, science flickered out, and Asian re- 
ligion took its place. Truly the slip-back from 
antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argu- 
ment to the atheists — the true and irredeemable 
atheists — who deny the reality of progress. 
Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can 
analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that 
catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bug- 
bear of their recurrence is nothing more than a 
bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestim- 
able safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the 
idea of movable types — and it is little to the credit 
of the Invisible King that they did not — the on- 
rush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have 
been half so disastrous. And even through the 
Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still 
perceptible, though its operation was terribly 
hampered. Then, at last, the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries took up the thread of progress 
where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived, 
and bade defiance to dogma. The garnering of 
knowledge began afresh; and true knowledge has 
this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like 
astrology, theology, and philately, that it is in- 
stinct with procreative vigour. Knowledge breeds 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 115 

knowledge with ever-increasing rapidity; and the 
result is that the past hundred years have seen 
additions to man's control over the powers of 
nature which outstrip the wildest imaginings of 
Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first went 
to Rome in 1832, his "transportation" was no 
swifter and scarcely more comfortable than that 
of Caesar in the fifties before Christ. Today he 
could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, 
and then cover the distance from Milan onwards 
at the rate of seventy miles an hour in a limousine 
as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are 
piling up the knowledge which is power at an 
enormous rate — -indeed rather too rapidly, since 
we have not yet the sense to discriminate between 
power for good and power for evil. But "burnt 
bairns dread the fire," and after the present awful 
experience, there is fair ground for hope that meas- 
ures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats for 
the criminal lunatics whose vanity and greed impel 
them to let loose the powers of destruction. 

Can any thinking man say that the world is quite 
the same to him since the invention of wireless 
telegraphy? True it is only one among the multi- 
tude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being 
dissembles himself. But is it not a phenomenon 



116 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

of a new and perhaps an epoch-marking order? 
It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but 
it somehow suggests an alteration — perhaps a pro- 
gressive alteration — in its texture. 

When we say we are sure of the fact of progress, 
the atheist comes down on us with the retort that 
we thereby confess ourselves naive and credulous 
optimists. As well say that when we express our 
confidence that the North Western Railway will 
carry us to Manchester, we thereby imply the 
belief that Manchester is the Earthly Paradise. It 
is quite possible — any one who is so minded may 
say it is quite probable — that progress means ad- 
vance towards disillusion. What we are sure of 
is merely this: that life may be, and ought to be, 
a very different thing from what it now is, and 
that it is in our own power to make it so. We 
have not the least doubt that the generations which 
come after us will say: — 

We will not cease from mortal strife, 
Nor shall the sword slip from our hand, 

Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England's green and pleasant land. 

But whether, when they have built it, they will 
think Jerusalem worth the building is quite a 
different matter. It may be that Leopardi was 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 117 

right when he said, "Men are miserable by neces- 
sity, but resolute in believing themselves to be 
miserable by accident." That is a proposition 
which the individual can accept or reject so far as 
his own little span is concerned, but on which the 
race, as such, can pass no valid judgment. Life 
has never had a fair chance. It has always been 
so beset with accidental and corrigible evils that 
no man can say what life, in its ultimate essence, 
really is. All we know is that many of its miseries 
are factitious, inessential, eminently curable; and 
till these are eradicated, how are we to determine 
whether there are other evils too deep-rooted for 
our surgery? It may be, for example, that the 
elimination of Pain would only leave a vacuum 
for Tedium to rush in; but how are we to decide 
this a priori? Let us learn what are the true 
potentialities of life before we undertake to declare 
whether it is worth living or not. 

Perhaps I may be allowed to quote at this point 
some words of my own which express the idea I 
am trying to convey as clearly as I am capable of 
putting it. They are part of the last paragraph 
of an address entitled Knowledge and Character: 
The Straight Road in Education: l 

i London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916. 



118 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the 
innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the 
theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man 
would never have been man ; he would only have been one more 
species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe, the 
reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But 
somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea 
that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better than 
unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead of 
"each man for himself" his motto became "each man for his 
family, or his tribe, or his nation, or — ultimately — for human- 
kind." And, at a very early stage, what made for association, 
co-operation, brotherhood, came to be designated "good," while 
that which sinned against these upward tendencies was stig- 
matized as "evil." From that moment the battle was won, 
and the transfiguration of human life became only a matter 
of time. The prejudice in favour of the idea of good is the 
fundamental fact of our moral nature. It has an irresistible, a 
magical prestige. We have made, and are still making, a 
myriad mistakes — tragic and horrible mistakes — in striving for 
good things which are evils in disguise. A few of us (though 
relatively not very many) try to overcome the prejudice alto- 
gether, and say, "Evil, be thou my good!" But even these 
recreants and deserters from the great army of humanity have 
to express themselves in terms of good, and to take their stand 
on a sheer contradiction. Evil, as such, has simply not a 
fighting chance. The prestige of good is stupendous. We 
are all hypnotized by it; and the reason we are slow in realiz- 
ing the ideal is, not that we are evil, but that we are stupid. 

"Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst ver- 
gebens" — no one had a better right to say that 
than a German poet. But though the Invisible 
King has made a poor fight against human 
stupidity, it is not really unconquerable. If Gods 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 119 

cannot conquer it, men can. Its strongholds are 
falling one by one, and, though a long fight is 
before us, its end is not in doubt. 

We may even hope, not without some plausi- 
bility, that moral progress may be all the more 
rapid in the future because the limit of what may 
be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far 
off. The conquest of distance is the great material 
fact that makes for world-organization; and 
distance cannot, after all, be more than annhilated 
— it cannot be reduced to a minus quantity. Now 
that we can whisper round the globe as we whisper 
round the dome of St. Paul's, we cannot get much 
further on that line of advance, until immaterial 
thought-transference shall enable us "to flash 
through one another in a moment as we will." We 
may before long have reduced the crossing of the 
Atlantic from five days to one, or even less; but 
in that direction, too, there is a limit to progress; 
no invention will enable us to arrive before we 
start. The conquest of physical disease seems to 
be well within view; the possibilities of intensive 
cultivation and selective breeding in plants and 
animals are likely to be rapidly developed. When 
such material problems cease to exercise the first 
fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental 



120 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

sciences, psychology and sociology, with the great 
neglected art of education, may come into their 
kingdom. Then the atheism which avers that the 
world stands still, or moves only in a circle, will 
no longer be possible. Then all reasonable men 
will feel themselves soldiers in "a mighty army 
which has won splendid victories (though here and 
there chequered with defeats) on its march out of 
the dim and tragic past, and is clearly destined to 
far greater triumphs in the future, if only each 
man does, with unflinching loyalty, the duty 
assigned to him." That loyalty will then be the 
conscious and acknowledged rule of life, as it is 
now in an instinctive and half -realized fashion. It 
will help us, more than all the personifications in 
the world, to "turn away from self." It will not 
take the sting from death, but it will enable us to 
feel that we have earned our rest, and brought no 
disgrace upon the colors of our regiment. 

Is it necessary to protest once more that this 
assurance of progress towards the good is not to 
be confounded with optimism? For it is clear 
that "good" is a question-begging word. The 
only possible definition of "good" is "that which 
makes for life" — for life, not only measured by 
quantity, but by quality and intensity — "that ye 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 121 

may have life more abundantly." Why is egoism 
evil? Because a world in which it reigned supreme 
would very soon come to an end, or at any rate 
could not support anything like the abundance of 
life which is rendered possible by mutual aid and 
co-operation. Why are order, justice, courage, 
humanity good? Because they enable more people 
to lead fuller lives than would be possible in the 
absence of such guiding principles. But in all this 
we assume the validity of the standard — "life" 
— which is precisely what pessimism denies. And 
pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right 
on't. It is quite conceivable that, having made 
the best that can possibly be made of life, a world- 
weary race might decide that the best was not 
good enough, and deliberately turn away from it. 
But that is a contingency, a speculation, which 
no sane man would allow to affect his action here 
and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades 
in the great terrestrial adventure. 

And is not this question of the ultimate value 
of life precisely one of the uncertainties which lend 
— if the flippancy may be excused — a "sporting 
interest" to our position? I have said that we 
have two elements of consolation: the things which 
are sure and the things which are unsure: in other 



122 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

words, the axioms and the mysteries. Reason is 
all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to 
trust to it; but it may prove, after all, that the 
things that are behind and beyond and above 
reason are the things that really matter. Does 
this seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at 
all — for the things obscurantism glories in are 
things beneath reason, which is quite another 
affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think 
that reason has drawn a complete outline-map of 
its "sphere of influence," in which there are many 
details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be 
shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for 
instance, very unreasonable to hold that we can 
draw a hard and fast line between the materially 
possible and impossible. There is certainly a 
curious ragged edge to our purely scientific knowl- 
edge, and it may well be that in following up the 
frayed-out threads we may come upon things very 
surprising and important. For example, the ques- 
tion whether consciousness can exist detached from 
organized matter, or attached to some form of 
matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard 
as purely a question of evidence; and I not only 
admit but assert that the evidence pointing in that 
direction is worthy of careful examination. The 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 123 

interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal 
immortality may be wrong, but that does not 
prove that the right interpretation is not worth 
discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have 
reached the Indies of their hopes, yet may have 
stumbled upon an unsuspected America. Nor does 
the fact that they are eager and credulous in- 
validate the whole, or anything like the whole, of 
their evidence. 

After all, is it a greater miracle that conscious- 
ness should exist detached from matter than that 
it should exist attached to matter? Yet the latter 
miracle nobody doubts, except in the nursery games 
of the metaphysicians. 

To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of 
mystery, which is yet as indisputably real as the 
realm of reason and sense, we naturally turn to 
the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it 
through the eyes of Francis Thompson, that crea- 
ture of transcendent vision who made a strange 
pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman 
Catholic Church. Thus he writes in his "Anthem 
of Earth":— 

Ay, Mother! Mother! 
What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, 
Thou lustingly engender'st, 
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, 



124 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

Crowned with all honour and all shamef ulness ? 

From nightly towers 

He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens, 

Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, 

And yet is he successive unto nothing 

But patrimony of a little mould, 

And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth 

Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, 

All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, 

All beauty and all starry majesties, 

And dim transtellar things; — even that it may, 

Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, 

Confess — "It is enough." The world left empty 

What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded 

For pride, for potency, infinity, 

All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, 

Arras'd with purple like the house of kings, — 

To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm 

Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries! 

Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, 

Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark 

As we ourselves, thy darkest! 

Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hiero- 
glyph to which reason supplies no key — nay, 
reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And does 
not this lend a strange fascination to the adven- 
ture of life? 

Another singer, in a very much simpler strain, 
puts something of the same idea: — 

Marooned on an isle of mystery, 

From a stupor of sleep we woke, 
And gazed at each other wistfully, 

A wondering, wildered folk. 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 125 

There were flowery valleys and mountains blue, 

And pastures, and herds galore, 
And fruits that were luscious to bite into, 

Though bitter at the core. 

So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird 

Through flickering gleam and gloom, 
And still for rescue we hoped — or feared — 

From our island home and tomb. 

But never over the sailless sea 

Came messenger bark or schooner 
With news from the far-off realm whence we 
Set sail for that isle of mystery, 
Or a whisper of apology 

From our mute, malign marooner. 

The strain of pessimism in this is even more 
marked than in Thompson's "Anthem"; and in- 
deed it is hard to deny that the resolute silence of 
the "Veiled Being," the "Invisible King," and all 
the Gods and godlings ever propounded to mortal 
piety, is one of their most suspicious character- 
istics. Yet it may be that this reproach, however 
natural, does the Veiled Being — or the Younger 
Power of our alternative myth — a measure of in- 
justice. It may be that the great Dramaturge 
keeps his plot to himself precisely in order that the 
interest may be maintained up to the fall of the 
curtain. It may be that its disclosure would upset 
the conditions of some vast experiment which he 



126 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

is working out. Where would be the interest of 
a race if its result were a foregone conclusion? 
Where the passion of a battle if its issue were 
foreknown? What if we should prove to be som- 
nambulists treading some dizzy edge between two 
abysses, and able to reach the goal only on con- 
dition that we are unconscious of the process? 
Perhaps the sanest view of the problem is that pre- 
sented in Bliss Carman's haunting poem 

THE JUGGLER 

Look how he throws them up and up, 
The beautiful golden balls! 
They hang aloft in the purple air, 
And there never is one that falls. 

He sends them hot from his steady hand, 
He teaches them all their curves; 
And whether the reach be little or long, 
There never is one that swerves. 

Some, like the tiny red one there, 

He never lets go far; 

And some he has sent to the roof of the tent 

To swim without a jar. 

So white and still they seem to hang, 
You wonder if he forgot 
To reckon the time of their return 
And measure their golden lot. 

Can it be that, hurried or tired out, 
The hand of the juggler shook? 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 127 

O never you fear, his eye is clear, 
He knows them all like a book. 

And they will home to his hand at last, 
For he pulls them by a cord 
Finer than silk and strong as fate, 
That is just the bid of his word. 

Was ever there such a sight in the world? 
Like a wonderful winding skein, — 
The way he tangles them up together 
And ravels them out again! 

If I could have him at the inn 

All by myself some night, — 

Inquire his country, and where in the world 

He came by that cunning sleight! 

Where do you guess he learned the trick 
To hold us gaping here, 

Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost 
Have forgotten the time of year? 

One never could have the least idea. 
Yet why he disposed to twit 
A fellow who does such wonderful things 
With the merest lack of wit? 

Likely enough, when the show is done 
And the balls all back in his hand, 
He'll tell us why he is smiling so, 
And we shall understand. 

I am not, perhaps, very firmly assured of this 
consummation. Yet I am much more hopeful 



128 GOD AND MR, WELLS 

of one day understanding the Juggler and the Balls 
than of ever getting into confidential relations with 
Mr. Wells's Invisible King. 



One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus 
rejecting the advances of so amiable a character 
as the Invisible King. But is Mr. Wells, on his 
side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the 
Veiled Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he 
seems to say; "I am tired of your guessing games. 
Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into 
ultimate origins, 9 and 'bring our minds to the 
conception of a spontaneous and developing God' 
— one of whose existence and benevolence we are 
sure, since we made him ourselves. I want some- 
thing to worship, to take me out of myself, to 
inspire me with brave phrases about death. How 
can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an 
enigma die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While 
you lurk obstinately behind that veil, how can I 
even know that your political views are sound? 
Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of 
the highest political wisdom, in a voice which I 
can scarcely distinguish from my own. You are 
a remote, tantalizing entity with nothing comfort- 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 129 

ing or stimulating about you. But as for my In- 
visible King, 'Closer is he than breathing, and 
nearer than hands and feet. 9 " 

A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to 
Moses; but, looked at from another point of view, 
he and his co-religionists may rather be likened 
to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for 
news from the God on the cloudy mountain-top, 
did they not make themselves a synthetic deity, 
finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King, 
inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, 
and done, in fact, nothing whatever? But the 
God on the mountain-top was wroth, and accused 
them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For 
what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, 
whether out of golden earrings or out of humani- 
tarian sentiments, and then bowing down and wor- 
shipping it? 

The wrath of the tribal God against his bovine 
rival was certainly excessive — yet we cannot regard 
idolatry as one of the loftier manifestations of the 
religious spirit. The man who can bow down and 
worship the work of his hands shows a morbid 
craving for self-abasement. It is possible, no 
doubt, to plead that the graven image is a mere 
symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the 



130 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can 
believe that the distinction between the sign and 
the thing signified is clear to the mind of the 
devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the 
type of mind which is capable of focussing its devo- 
tion upon a statuette is also capable of dis- 
tinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the 
idea of a portrait. But when we pass from the 
work of a man's hands to the work of his brain 
— from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental 
construction — the plea of symbolism can no longer 
be advanced. This graven image of the mind, so 
to speak, is the veritable God, or it is nothing; 
and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his 
assurances that it is the veritable God. That is 
what makes his whole attitude and argument so 
baffling. One can understand an idolater who 
says "I believe that my God inhabits yonder im- 
age," or "Yonder image is only a convenient point 
of concentration for the reverence, gratitude, and 
love which pass through it to the august and trans- 
cendent Spirit whom it symbolizes." But how are 
we to understand the idolater who adores, and 
claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his 
own brain and the brains of a certain number of 
like-minded persons? Is it not as though a ven- 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 131 

triloquist were to prostrate himself before his own 
puppet? 

This craving for something to worship points to 
an almost uncanny recrudescence of the spirit of 
Asia in a fine European intelligence. For my own 
part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's 
case to be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. 
It is possible that an epidemic of Asiatic religiosity 
may be one of the sequels of the War. If that be 
so — if there are many people who shrink from the 
condition of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search 
of a respectable "daimio" to whom to pay their de- 
votion — I beg leave strongly to urge the claims of 
the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King. 

He has at the outset the not inconsiderable ad- 
vantage of being an entity instead of a non-entity. 
Whoever or whatever he may be, we are compelled 
by the very constitution of our minds to assume his 
(or its) existence; whereas there is manifestly no 
compulsion to assume the existence of the Invisible 
King. 

Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpre- 
tentious. There is no bluster and no cant about 
him. He does not claim our gratitude for the 
doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be 
just, while he is committing, or winking at, the 



132 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

most intolerable injustices. He does not set up to 
be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly 
touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while 
the incurable ward, the battlefield — nay, even the 
maternity home and the dentist's parlor — are 
there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am 
not contrasting him with the Invisible King, but 
with more ancient and still more Asian divinities.) 
It is the moral pretensions tagged on by the theolo- 
gians to metaphysical Godhead that revolt and 
estrange reasonable men — Mr. Wells among the 
rest. If you tell us that behind the Veil we shall 
find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who 
chastens us only for our good, is pleased by our 
flatteries (with or without music), and is not more 
than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in the 
Garden of Eden and elsewhere — we reply that this 
is a nursery tale which has been riddled, time out 
of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but by the spon- 
taneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and suck- 
lings. But if you divest the Veiled Being of all 
ethical — or in other words of all human — attri- 
butes, then there is no difficulty whatever in ad- 
miring, and even adoring, the marvels he has 
wrought. Tennyson went deeper than he realized 
into the nature of things when he wrote — 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 133 

"For merit lives from man to man, 
But not from man, O Lord, to thee." 

Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, 
of praise and blame, and more especially (but this 
will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and damnation 
— and nothing can be easier than to pay to the 
works of the Veiled Being the meed of an illimit- 
able wonder. When we think of the roaring vor- 
tices of flame that spangle the heavens night by 
night, at distances that beggar conception: when we 
think of our tiny earth, wrapped in its little film of 
atmosphere, spinning safely for ages untold amid 
all these appalling immensities: and when we 
think, on the other hand, of the battles of claw 
and maw going on, beneath the starry vault, in 
that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: 
we cannot but own that the Power which set all 
this whirl of atoms agoing is worthy of all admira- 
tion. And approbation? Ah, that is another mat- 
ter; for there the moral element comes in. It is 
possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) 
that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself 
even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing 
so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely 
useless to speculate. Light may one day come to 
us, but it will come through patient investigation, 



134 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

not through idle pondering and guessing. In the 
meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the 
microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and 
being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle of all, 
we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things 
the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be 
religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. 
Wells. I am even willing to join him in some out- 
ward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if 
he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously 
inadequate. What about kneeling through the C 
Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as 
near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Prim- 
rose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Am- 
bassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship 
the Sun, chanting to him William Watson's magni- 
ficent hymn: — 

"To thee as our Father we bow, 
Forbidden thy Father to see, 
Who is older and greater than thou, as thou 
Art greater and older than we." 

The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech, 
and is a symbol which runs no risk of being mis- 
taken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be con- 
tent with some such "bright sciential idolatry," 
I would willingly declare myself a co-idolater. 



BACK TO THE VEILED BEING 135 

But alas! he is the hierophant of the Invisible King, 
and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me 
a moral impossibility. I would rather face dam- 
nation, especially in the mild form threatened by 
Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 148-149) in not 
knowing that you are damned. 

And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship 
of the non-moral Veiled Being there is no practical, 
pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not so sure 
of that. When all is said and done, is there not 
more hope, more solace, in an enigma than in a 
facon de parler? I should be quite willing to ac- 
cept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The aviator 
can say to his soul: "Here am I, one of the most 
amazing births of time, the culmination of an end- 
less series of miracles. Perhaps I am on the verge 
of extinction — if so, what does it all matter? But 
perhaps, on the contrary, I am about to plunge into 
some new adventure, as marvellous as this. More 
marvellous it cannot be, but it may perhaps be more 
agreeable. At all events, there is something fasci- 
nating in this leap in the dark. Good bye, my 
soul! Good-bye, my memory! 

'If we should meet again, why, we shall smile; 
If not, why then this parting was well made.' " 



136 GOD AND MR. WELLS 

I cannot but think that there is as much religion 
and as much solace in such a shaking-off of "the 
bur o' the world" as in the thought that the last 
new patent God is going to die with you, and that 
you, unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in 
him, are going to live for even 



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